Yesterday, in the finals of KeSPA Cup, Chief Executive of KeSPA Jun Byung Hun has made an appearance and gave a speech about the tournament and the state and future of SK Telecom Proleague heading into 2015.
Article has been posted on Daily e-Sports on 2014-09-14 19:19 about this event.
In one part of his interview he mentioned that he has talked to the CEO of Blizzard Entertainment Michael Morhaime, back in July, about the cooperation between Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. and Korea e-Sports Association, in which he also hinted if not confirmed that Proleague 2015 will be incorporated in WCS system and may award WCS points for the World Championship Series of 2015.
Yes they should be given to these players. You have so many players performing amazingly in pro league and missing out on foreign events because they chose to focus on this tournament. SoO isn't guranteed a blizzcon spot despite two final appearances, he deserves more points in the form of his pro league performance to help guarantee a spot
Much rather have more individual tournaments based in Korea, than rewarding WCS points for something that has nothing to do with individual performances, and that 99% of players cannot participate in (no, its not the same as MLG/DH/IEM, because everyone "can" participate, if they travel).
I'll quote myself from a thread where this got lost in a debate wether Catz thinks people are idiots or not:
On September 10 2014 19:27 sagi wrote: Giving points to Proleague might be the best way to compensate KeSPA players who can't attend smaller tournaments due to scheduling conflicts. It could also allocate points in much more even way among larger playerbase (around 4-5 players per team) in contrast to the "top few takes it all" of GSL/WCS.
Lets say a map win in PL grants you 20 points. This would have totaled 11100 points in this year making it almost equivalent of a single WCS tournament. However if we look at the stats for this year most players wouldn't get that much points.
As you can see this isn't a lot. Taking this into consideration even more points might be reasonable to make the point pool for the best players reflect atleast the structure of a tier 2 event. Naturally other scenarios could also work like giving top X players of each PL round some fixed amount of points. This however would most likely be a top heavy distribution and might tie players to PL even more (we had some players taking breaks this year to go to foreign events).
Thus the problem would be determining what is the right amount of points and how to divide them among the players. Even a small boost might help the very best to reach the finals. Also, from the current rules' point of view we have to remember that PL is not an open league. If I remember correctly, to award points they should be accessible to everyone through qualifiers.
WCS points for Proleague is just silly. Time and time again we have seen that people who do amazingly in team leagues (and PL in particular) can comically fail in individual leagues.
On September 15 2014 20:00 shabby wrote: Much rather have more individual tournaments based in Korea, than rewarding WCS points for something that has nothing to do with individual performances, and that 99% of players cannot participate in (no, its not the same as MLG/DH/IEM, because everyone "can" participate, if they travel).
This topic is getting clubbed to death.
DH, IEM and those tournaments are not created by blizzard, they are created by organizers that does it because they want to. They don't do it for gain, its people that work for free because they choose to.
You want those kinds of tournaments in korea, then please by all means go and organize them. Don't just randomly expect people to do things for free for you, especially not in a country far away for just the purpose of distribuate WCS points evenly.
On September 15 2014 20:00 shabby wrote: Much rather have more individual tournaments based in Korea, than rewarding WCS points for something that has nothing to do with individual performances, and that 99% of players cannot participate in (no, its not the same as MLG/DH/IEM, because everyone "can" participate, if they travel).
This topic is getting clubbed to death.
DH, IEM and those tournaments are not created by blizzard, they are created by organizers that does it because they want to. They don't do it for gain, its people that work for free because they choose to.
You want those kinds of tournaments in korea, then please by all means go and organize them. Don't just randomly expect people to do things for free for you, especially not in a country far away for just the purpose of distribuate WCS points evenly.
This would be the best solution, have more tournaments in Korea. But you would need someone to throw money in it and.. hem, I guess it's not very realistic. WCS points for proleague kind of look like the best option left
I'm very torn on this.. I think that ProLeague should be a self-dependent team league, not having any ties with the WCS SOLO league system.
On the other hand, Korean pros lack the ability to gather WCS points if they can not travel abroad. The ideal situation would of course be that Korean-only players have the same amount of opportunity to place for Blizzcon compared to foreigners/Koreans playing EU or NA. So in that sense this is good for them.
But I still don't like it. Is there no other way? I believe SCII is not in a very healthy position in Korea, so Korean versions of Dreamhack will probably have no way of financing the tournaments. Maybe award more points for Code A and Code S?
I think that will be difficult to add WCS Points to a Team League, it might have a very precise points system.
But imho, the most important think for KeSPA is to collaborate with Blizzard to organize their calendar to allow players to participate to foreigner events. It will be better for the players, that can visit the world and compete outside of korea, it's better for Blizzard, because the top16 will be near to the REAL top 16, and it will be better for the events because of the high level of the games.
Don't forget Proleague is what is holding the Korean scene up and telling korean players if they want to compete at blizzcon they have to win GSL at least once or you are going to find it very tough to go is a crime. The teams they play on are stable for the most part but the teams are focused on proleague for obvious sponsorship reasons so the teams players must focus on proleague. As someone pointed out with the 20 points per win system the players dont actually get that many points unless they are a monster( which means they deserve as much points as they would get).
Koreans shouldnt get punished now that they are region locked simply because they dont want to leave a stable kespa team
this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
Better soultions would be to work around the problem. PL giving WCS points is as much damaging to the competetive integrity of WCS as giving points to invited players is.
KeSPA sends one player from each team to a couple of foreign events, or something along those lines, would be better.
Korea certainly needs more WCS points and encouraging the top players to stay and play in the scene's premier team league can hardly be a bad thing. They often give up the opportunity to travel to DH's and IEM's because of these team commitments. It seems foolish to deprive the supposed 'world cup' of starcraft of some of its best players because they're too busy promoting our scene's flagship teamleague.
On September 15 2014 20:00 shabby wrote: Much rather have more individual tournaments based in Korea, than rewarding WCS points for something that has nothing to do with individual performances, and that 99% of players cannot participate in (no, its not the same as MLG/DH/IEM, because everyone "can" participate, if they travel).
Yes of course more tournaments would be better, but Korea just doesn't seem to be able to sustain them yet (for various reasons though I'm sure it's possible if they thought more internationally). Saying proleague has nothing to do with individual performance is just ridiculous. It's made up of individual 1v1 Bo1's and is arguably more competitive than some majors (Hello Moscow!). It's not going to be KT wins and the whole team gets points (makes 0 sense) but individuals being awarded by results. Winning regularly at PL means consistent excellence and constant adaptation (players have a week to figure you out) rather than the lucky streak needed for deep, weekend tournament runs.
As for 99% of players can't participate in proleague. So what? The rest of the world still has plenty of opportunity for points and a couple more proleague players qualifying for Blizzcon should be welcomed.
On September 15 2014 21:00 Darkdwarf wrote: PL giving WCS points is as much damaging to the competetive integrity of WCS as giving points to invited players is.
The real thing damaging the competitive integrity of WCS is, if locked today, players like San and Stardust would be ranked #7 and #8 whilst soO and Rain wouldn't even qualify.
Kespa playrs cant participate in foreign events.it costs ... they only send the big names.what they should do is make more special events like in bw and award them with tier 2 wcs points.
hmm sounds annoying, while some people might like it there are also enough against it. And for me its more a confirmation that Korea won't get to many tournaments. On the other hand if true it would confirm that they will open up to everyone. Would laugh my ass of though if people would get points for losing in a bo1 tough.
hmm, I would be vehemently opposed to this. This would mean that WCS points from here on in are not earned on merit but on whether your coach fields you or not.
It also rubs me the wrong way that people feel a need to compensate people who made a financial choice to sign for a Kespa team, damn well knowing that it would cost them WCS points. They made a choice and it has a disadvantage, oh noes, we must take that disadvantage away!
On September 15 2014 21:07 lastride wrote: Kespa playrs cant participate in foreign events.it costs ... they only send the big names.what they should do is make more special events like in bw and award them with tier 2 wcs points.
The big names as in the ones who have the good record in proleague and would benefit the most from this new system because they would have access to a pool of points a vast majority of the base wouldn't have? That is basically how it would go. The people who will get sent to the foreign events for points are the same people who would be the regulars for proleague and would also be getting points that way so its not as if there wont be substantial double dipping.
Since Blizzard is going to region lock it only makes sense they subsidize more WCS points to Korea, be it PL or whatever.
On September 10 2014 19:27 sagi wrote: Giving points to Proleague might be the best way to compensate KeSPA players who can't attend smaller tournaments due to scheduling conflicts. It could also allocate points in much more even way among larger playerbase (around 4-5 players per team) in contrast to the "top few takes it all" of GSL/WCS.
Lets say a map win in PL grants you 20 points. This would have totaled 11100 points in this year making it almost equivalent of a single WCS tournament. However if we look at the stats for this year most players wouldn't get that much points.
As you can see this isn't a lot. Taking this into consideration even more points might be reasonable to make the point pool for the best players reflect atleast the structure of a tier 2 event. Naturally other scenarios could also work like giving top X players of each PL round some fixed amount of points. This however would most likely be a top heavy distribution and might tie players to PL even more (we had some players taking breaks this year to go to foreign events).
Thus the problem would be determining what is the right amount of points and how to divide them among the players. Even a small boost might help the very best to reach the finals. Also, from the current rules' point of view we have to remember that PL is not an open league. If I remember correctly, to award points they should be accessible to everyone through qualifiers.
On September 15 2014 19:57 Zaphid wrote: It would be better if like 3 MVPs could qualify for Blizzcon directly than just giving WCS points to a locked tournament
its funny that you mention this, because you misspelled Mvp's name in your quote bar
WCS points in a teamleague... This is not ok for many reasons. Just do 4-5 Tier3 weekends-tournaments in KR (everyone is allowed to attend) and GSL give 10% more wcs points.
Meh, I have never understood the obsession of some people about WCS points. The system is broken by design. Some people try to make it "fairer" by hotfixing the worst parts of perceived unfairness, but the system only gets more complicated and confusing rather than objectively better.
Tournaments only care about the WCS branding and promotion. The WCS points narrative is pretty flat and just too confusing for anyone to really care about.
All this for you to get to Blizzcon that isn't even close to the relative importance of The International. It probably is more important to sponsors, but for fans it's a little bit more important than other premier tournaments but not a-year-of-collecting-points-much. SC2 tournaments that have too much importance put into them sometimes tend to end with disappointments. First round losers get nothing and this year not even Blizzcon stage time. It's also on a bad time for Europeans, a big part of the community.
No way. Seriously. As long as the idea of WCS is to determine a "world champion", Blizzard should just go full region lock and remove all WCS points from events such as Dreamhack, IEM etc. Adding in team tournaments is just screwing the system.
As for the state that WCS is in now, it could also be called "a year-long way to get 16 players for a 100k tournament for blizzcon".
stop wcs points and invite all the wcs champions at Blizzcon. Especially if you go the region lock way. The standings right now are a huge joke for something promoted as the tournament to crown the best 2014 player (and it's Zest btw)
On September 15 2014 21:59 SinCitta wrote: Meh, I have never understood the obsession of some people about WCS points. The system is broken by design. Some people try to make it "fairer" by hotfixing the worst parts of perceived unfairness, but the system only gets more complicated and confusing rather than objectively better.
Tournaments only care about the WCS branding and promotion. The WCS points narrative is pretty flat and just too confusing for anyone to really care about.
All this for you to get to Blizzcon that isn't even close to the relative importance of The International. It probably is more important to sponsors, but for fans it's a little bit more important than other premier tournaments but not a-year-of-collecting-points-much. SC2 tournaments that have too much importance put into them sometimes tend to end with disappointments. First round losers get nothing and this year not even Blizzcon stage time. It's also on a bad time for Europeans, a big part of the community.
Some people may disagree with you about not caring about the WCS points narrative - at least for some of us it became a source of a lot of fun and a good way to make watching tourneys, particularly towards the end of the year, more interesting. See http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/436957-wcs-predictor-2014
On September 15 2014 21:59 SinCitta wrote: Meh, I have never understood the obsession of some people about WCS points. The system is broken by design. Some people try to make it "fairer" by hotfixing the worst parts of perceived unfairness, but the system only gets more complicated and confusing rather than objectively better.
Tournaments only care about the WCS branding and promotion. The WCS points narrative is pretty flat and just too confusing for anyone to really care about.
All this for you to get to Blizzcon that isn't even close to the relative importance of The International. It probably is more important to sponsors, but for fans it's a little bit more important than other premier tournaments but not a-year-of-collecting-points-much. SC2 tournaments that have too much importance put into them sometimes tend to end with disappointments. First round losers get nothing and this year not even Blizzcon stage time. It's also on a bad time for Europeans, a big part of the community.
Some people may disagree with you about not caring about the WCS points narrative - at least for some of us it became a source of a lot of fun and a good way to make watching tourneys, particularly towards the end of the year, more interesting. See http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/436957-wcs-predictor-2014
I don't understand those who say WCS points doesn't add anything. I've probably visited the points standings about every third day all year this year and last year. I think it's an awesome system that should just continue to be tweaked and then used as seeding for all tournaments.
On September 15 2014 21:59 SinCitta wrote: Meh, I have never understood the obsession of some people about WCS points. The system is broken by design. Some people try to make it "fairer" by hotfixing the worst parts of perceived unfairness, but the system only gets more complicated and confusing rather than objectively better.
Tournaments only care about the WCS branding and promotion. The WCS points narrative is pretty flat and just too confusing for anyone to really care about.
All this for you to get to Blizzcon that isn't even close to the relative importance of The International. It probably is more important to sponsors, but for fans it's a little bit more important than other premier tournaments but not a-year-of-collecting-points-much. SC2 tournaments that have too much importance put into them sometimes tend to end with disappointments. First round losers get nothing and this year not even Blizzcon stage time. It's also on a bad time for Europeans, a big part of the community.
Some people may disagree with you about not caring about the WCS points narrative - at least for some of us it became a source of a lot of fun and a good way to make watching tourneys, particularly towards the end of the year, more interesting. See http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/436957-wcs-predictor-2014
I don't understand those who say WCS points doesn't add anything. I've probably visited the points standings about every third day all year this year and last year. I think it's an awesome system that should just continue to be tweaked and then used as seeding for all tournaments.
There is no fair way to use a point system to determine participation of a global tournament. There's so much whine already because KeSPA players can't participate in Dreamhacks or IEMs, and "why should the WCS EU winner get the same amount of points like WCS KR since KR is so much harder" etc - the WCS system is fun and gimmicky and everyone is like "oh look player xy attends blizzcon and omg snute didn't make it" but it is no tool that determines a "World Champion". So maybe the brand should change, if the system doesn't. For me, GSL winner = world champion.
"Toying with the idea of opening ProLeague to the world" might mean something about broadcasting or tournament locales. Is it confirmed that it implies the giving of points?
Lol well this would give me a lot more work for WCS Predictor 2015! Not sure if it's a good idea or not though considering things like being chosen to be sent out especially if you're on a weak team or if you're on a strong team, and the other issue of coaches sending out a player more just because they need the points... Idk
On September 15 2014 23:58 IntoTheheart wrote: "Toying with the idea of opening ProLeague to the world" might mean something about broadcasting or tournament locales. Is it confirmed that it implies the giving of points?
It means that they would allow foreign teams to participate, making it "open" for everyone to join if they are willing.
On September 15 2014 23:58 IntoTheheart wrote: "Toying with the idea of opening ProLeague to the world" might mean something about broadcasting or tournament locales. Is it confirmed that it implies the giving of points?
It means that they would allow foreign teams to participate, making it "open" for everyone to join if they are willing.
I don't think coaches would send players to play in PL just because they need the WCS points. PL is way more important to them than the few points a possible win would award. Hence, I don't think the integrity of the WCS system would be compromised by this.
I do however understand the complaints about PL being a closed league. In theory awarding WCS points to a closed league is not right, but the WCS system is so screwed up imho that this change could actually improve things.
How about... SOME WCS points for the best performing player of each team every different round? Sounds kind of fair. I agree that PL is a teams tournament, but I wouldn't just shut down the idea of incorporating WCS somehow to it.
This only makes sense to me if they are straight up going to say like "4 players per region + 4 wildcards based on points/qualifier of some next top 8/something"
Because invites to tourneys, regional teamleagues, etc etc make a bit of a logistics mess of "oh is player Y going to get top 8 at some random tournament to squeeze in 100 more points?" or "who gets to all kill weakest team in proleague"
This actually looks pretty good considering Jaedong would probably be knocked down by whoever does well in this GSL, although Maru would probably be knocked out too lol, regardless of fanboyism increasing the points for GSL looks like a good thing and I think this shows that the idea is good even if double is bit too much.
On September 16 2014 00:39 N.geNuity wrote: This only makes sense to me if they are straight up going to say like "4 players per region + 4 wildcards based on points/qualifier of some next top 8/something"
Because invites to tourneys, regional teamleagues, etc etc make a bit of a logistics mess of "oh is player Y going to get top 8 at some random tournament to squeeze in 100 more points?
I think WCS partners need to stop giving points for 16th place and even 8th place, it's just too easy for a Korean to fly to a random tournament and almost always get points for top 16 or top 8. And maybe WCS AM/EU/GSL need to give less top heavy points so that a 4th place is actually rewarded lol, especially in GSL. Actually now I'm thinking maybe GSL should increase the points of every placing by 50% except for the 1st place (maybe only 25% more for 1st).
This actually looks pretty good considering Jaedong would probably be knocked down by whoever does well in this GSL, although Maru would probably be knocked out too lol, regardless of fanboyism increasing the points for GSL looks like a good thing and I think this shows that the idea is good even if double is bit too much.
Even better would be more GSL seasons, spreading out the points more among the really skilled players. More opportunities for consistent point earning.
This actually looks pretty good considering Jaedong would probably be knocked down by whoever does well in this GSL, although Maru would probably be knocked out too lol, regardless of fanboyism increasing the points for GSL looks like a good thing and I think this shows that the idea is good even if double is bit too much.
Even better would be more GSL seasons, spreading out the points more among the really skilled players. More opportunities for consistent point earning.
Any other things you'd like to see Blizzard pay attention to in 2015?
Hm, I'd like it if they'd try to get KeSPA players opinions when they're making balance patches. Like, have KeSPA send out a survey to all the players. I'd like it if they'd ask all of us our opinions. Also, when they're making new maps, I'd like it if they asked us our opinions before making them ladder maps. Finally, it would be great if we could have four or more GSLs a year. Three is too few T_T
This actually looks pretty good considering Jaedong would probably be knocked down by whoever does well in this GSL, although Maru would probably be knocked out too lol, regardless of fanboyism increasing the points for GSL looks like a good thing and I think this shows that the idea is good even if double is bit too much.
Even better would be more GSL seasons, spreading out the points more among the really skilled players. More opportunities for consistent point earning.
Yea but how many more seasons do you expect them to add? Maybe 1? I think adding a season and also giving a boost (maybe 25%) to the points for 8th, 4th, and 2nd places would be great.
One of the actual problem for WCS System is that EU-korean can just spam DH/IEM and have a free access to BlizzCon. Look jjakji for example, The only memorable risult is the 2° place at DH, some days ago, and he is #9 with 100% of going to the BlizzCon. This is because he just partecipate to all the DreamHack achievengo Ro16 when he was in a good form but this was enought for him to farm points.
Maybe points for only the top4 or something like that can be better
This actually looks pretty good considering Jaedong would probably be knocked down by whoever does well in this GSL, although Maru would probably be knocked out too lol, regardless of fanboyism increasing the points for GSL looks like a good thing and I think this shows that the idea is good even if double is bit too much.
Even better would be more GSL seasons, spreading out the points more among the really skilled players. More opportunities for consistent point earning.
Any other things you'd like to see Blizzard pay attention to in 2015?
Hm, I'd like it if they'd try to get KeSPA players opinions when they're making balance patches. Like, have KeSPA send out a survey to all the players. I'd like it if they'd ask all of us our opinions. Also, when they're making new maps, I'd like it if they asked us our opinions before making them ladder maps. Finally, it would be great if we could have four or more GSLs a year. Three is too few T_T
I think three seasons is just right. Having too many seasons kind of devaluates each season and most importantly the title of the champion. I'd rather have a second tournament series running alongside it.
This actually looks pretty good considering Jaedong would probably be knocked down by whoever does well in this GSL, although Maru would probably be knocked out too lol, regardless of fanboyism increasing the points for GSL looks like a good thing and I think this shows that the idea is good even if double is bit too much.
Even better would be more GSL seasons, spreading out the points more among the really skilled players. More opportunities for consistent point earning.
Any other things you'd like to see Blizzard pay attention to in 2015?
Hm, I'd like it if they'd try to get KeSPA players opinions when they're making balance patches. Like, have KeSPA send out a survey to all the players. I'd like it if they'd ask all of us our opinions. Also, when they're making new maps, I'd like it if they asked us our opinions before making them ladder maps. Finally, it would be great if we could have four or more GSLs a year. Three is too few T_T
I think three seasons is just right. Having too many seasons kind of devaluates each season and most importantly the title of the champion. I'd rather have a second tournament series running alongside it.
ESL to open studio in Seoul and start WCS Korea alongside GSL? Yes, please.
I just randomly threw out a very big number because that's how Blizzard operates. This list looks much better than the current WCS standings, though. It's far more indicative of actual skill and performance.
I just randomly threw out a very big number because that's how Blizzard operates. This list looks much better than the current WCS standings, though. It's far more indicative of actual skill and performance.
It's funny to read all these people saying "Just do more tournaments in Korea," these tournaments aren't just going to appear out of thin air. The reason why they might add points to proleague is because proleague is already an established thing, no one has to put more money into the scene.
On September 16 2014 01:40 NexUmbra wrote: It's funny to read all these people saying "Just do more tournaments in Korea," these tournaments aren't just going to appear out of thin air. The reason why they might add points to proleague is because proleague is already an established thing, no one has to put more money into the scene.
And why exactly this begun with sc2? Before sc2 came out, Korea had ~5 wc3 & CS1.6 weekend-tournaments yearly (2004-2009) with great prizepool. Edit: I dont follow CS:GO, but I guess CS:GO doesnt have tournaments in KR too.
On September 16 2014 01:40 NexUmbra wrote: It's funny to read all these people saying "Just do more tournaments in Korea," these tournaments aren't just going to appear out of thin air. The reason why they might add points to proleague is because proleague is already an established thing, no one has to put more money into the scene.
And why exactly this begun with sc2? Before sc2 came out, Korea had ~5 wc3 & CS1.6 weekend-tournaments yearly (2004-2009) with great prizepool. Edit: I dont follow CS:GO, but I guess CS:GO doesnt have tournaments in KR too.
I think it's a symptom of following the BW model where most of the interest was consolidated in a few big long-term leagues (like MSL, OSL, Proleague then; now GSL and Proleague). Other tournaments would have to work around them, and most just ended up being products of KeSPA (or its subsidiaries) and Gom themselves.
From my perspective, Blizzcon would be at its best if its about 50 percent KeSPA players and 50 percent everybody else. The truth is the top KeSPA pros are the best in the world and I want to see them at Blizzcon. So I'm all for this. Even cooler though would be if Blizzard put together a showmatch at Blizzcon or elsewhere that pitted the current proleague champs against a team of all star foreigners. Because Blizzcon also doesn't feature enough non-Koreans.
Make Proleague an open tournament for all teams around the world and give points for every round individual wins/ team wins - round winners or whatever , fans and players could also benefit if it was atleast a Bo7 with a Bo9 round playe-offs . Just like there is a Dreamhack/IEM tournament every so month there were 5 round finals that could have given points to the most winning players . That way people won't bitch about it being restricted , and players / teams can choose in what they want to invest .
Europe and America is saturated with all this little 2-3 day tournaments . Korean and foreigners not in Kespa just tour around the world collecting points without even winning tournaments , just scraping a top 16 , 8 , top 4 every now and then and they get to go to blizzcon with this tournament tourism .
While on the other hand The top ACEs of each teams barely gets any point in Proleague and unless you're Zest with the best PvZ and PvP in the world and win a couple of GSLs , or herO and Classic who are almost as solid as Zest and proly better then him in PvT you won't get to blizzcon . Even sOs who wins all this big priced tournaments could probably not make it in blizzcon to defend his title .
With all do respect to some of the players in that top 16 or top 25 list calculated in the WCS predictor , are they more deserving then players like Soo who won god knows how many second places in GSL , or players like Rain , Maru , and probably all of the top 2 - 3 players on each Kespa team ? Kespa is an year long tournament and doesn't get any points while the 3 day tournaments supply points . I think there is something wrong with that .
Thats why we see top of the top players like Rain , Parting , Effort leaving Kespa teams , because of the stagnation , not much benefits in playing for the best teams in the world nor in the strongest league in the world . If points are calculated fairly i don't see why Proleague can't be integrated in the Blizzcon system ? And the haters will say , "but it's a teamleague" and so what if it is ? It is the only teamleague i think it deserves better then a weekend long tournament ... Proleague needs more recognition and more influx of players , money and points . That or Kespa cup running every month with a similar Dreamhack/IEM price pool - points , could also do the job , but i would rather see more being invested in Proleague , where i could root for a team , not just a player .
It would be best if there was a season world final after every season of GSL / WCS AM /WCS EU , similar to last year . I don't know why it got scrapped this year . It was way more entertaining then watching tens of smaller tournaments throughout the year .
On September 16 2014 01:40 NexUmbra wrote: It's funny to read all these people saying "Just do more tournaments in Korea," these tournaments aren't just going to appear out of thin air. The reason why they might add points to proleague is because proleague is already an established thing, no one has to put more money into the scene.
And why exactly this begun with sc2? Before sc2 came out, Korea had ~5 wc3 & CS1.6 weekend-tournaments yearly (2004-2009) with great prizepool. Edit: I dont follow CS:GO, but I guess CS:GO doesnt have tournaments in KR too.
I think it's a symptom of following the BW model where most of the interest was consolidated in a few big long-term leagues (like MSL, OSL, Proleague then; now GSL and Proleague). Other tournaments would have to work around them, and most just ended up being products of KeSPA (or its subsidiaries) and Gom themselves.
3 OSLs and 3 MSLs every year is 6 tournaments per year, double what we have with GSL currently. We wouldn't be having this problem if that was still the case.
How can people possibly see this as unfair? Committing to playing in proleague is a far bigger commitment than going to any of these weekend tournaments that give massive points, why would you not reward points for the most competitive team league? How is it fair exactly that players in proleague commit months of their time often forsaking individual league showings yet get nothing for it?
On September 16 2014 04:05 raga4ka wrote: Make Proleague an open tournament for all teams around the world and give points for every round individual wins/ team wins - round winners or whatever , fans and players could also benefit if it was atleast a Bo7 with a Bo9 round playe-offs . Just like there is a Dreamhack/IEM tournament every so month there were 5 round finals that could have given points to the most winning players . That way people won't bitch about it being restricted , and players / teams can choose in what they want to invest .
No, an open teamleague tournament just feels that this isnt a serious tournament anymore. Just give 50% or 100% more points at GSL, that pretty fine.
Europe and America is saturated with all this little 2-3 day tournaments . Korean and foreigners not in Kespa just tour around the world collecting points without even winning tournaments , just scraping a top 16 , 8 , top 4 every now and then and they get to go to blizzcon with this tournament tourism .
I dislike this wcs system aswell, I said one year ago such nonWCS tournaments shouldn't give any points. Only the actual wcs gices points. wcs points reduce the meaning of DH/IEM alot because they are there because of wcs points.
With all do respect to some of the players in that top 16 or top 25 list calculated in the WCS predictor , are they more deserving then players like Soo who won god knows how many second places in GSL , or players like Rain , Maru , and probably all of the top 2 - 3 players on each Kespa team ? Kespa is an year long tournament and doesn't get any points while the 3 day tournaments supply points . I think there is something wrong with that .
As many said, someone did a wcs ranking if GSL gives double points (Zest 1st, soO 5th etc).
Thats why we see top of the top players like Rain , Parting , Effort leaving Kespa teams , because of the stagnation , not much benefits in playing for the best teams in the world nor in the strongest league in the world . If points are calculated fairly i don't see why Proleague can't be integrated in the Blizzcon system ? And the haters will say , "but it's a teamleague" and so what if it is ? It is the only teamleague i think it deserves better then a weekend long tournament ... Proleague needs more recognition and more influx of players , money and points . That or Kespa cup running every month with a similar Dreamhack/IEM price pool - points , could also do the job , but i would rather see more being invested in Proleague , where i could root for a team , not just a player .
Blizzcon is an individual tournament. If someone qualfies for individual tournament because he did a great job in a teamleague, this just feels so wrong (and undeserved). You should ask Parting or Rain, they like overseas and weekends tournaments, unlike Innovation (he said that too before he joined Acer).
Makes sense to me. It's a bit unfair that players who only play proleague have no chance of attending blizzcon and proleague has a high level of play and should be rewarded as such
On September 15 2014 21:26 Wroshe wrote: hmm, I would be vehemently opposed to this. This would mean that WCS points from here on in are not earned on merit but on whether your coach fields you or not.
right now it's whether your team has moneyz to send you to whatever tournament or not. The WCS system is stupid in the first place.
Hey Kespa Cup was pretty fun and they had WCS points. Couldn't they do those maybe 4 times a year? And could they make it so that the players with the highest win rate that season get a granted seed?
On September 16 2014 05:23 Kevn23 wrote: The easiest way to fix this is to have the top 32 in WCS points participate at Blizzcon. All problems solved.
no way, you need at least the top 256
Well according to the current rankings, top 32 pretty much includes (I think) everyone would like to see, minus DRG and Parting, maybe Dear, oh and Scarlett.
On September 16 2014 05:23 Kevn23 wrote: The easiest way to fix this is to have the top 32 in WCS points participate at Blizzcon. All problems solved.
no way, you need at least the top 256
Well according to the current rankings, top 32 pretty much includes (I think) everyone would like to see, minus DRG and Parting, maybe Dear.
haha yea, just teasing you, it's a good idea of course, but they have time and money constraints to work within, and 32 players might also dilute the story of the top 16 making it to blizzcon
On September 16 2014 05:23 Kevn23 wrote: The easiest way to fix this is to have the top 32 in WCS points participate at Blizzcon. All problems solved.
no way, you need at least the top 256
Well according to the current rankings, top 32 pretty much includes (I think) everyone would like to see, minus DRG and Parting, maybe Dear.
haha yea, just teasing you, it's a good idea of course, but they have time and money constraints to work within, and 32 players might also dilute the story of the top 16 making it to blizzcon
Yeah I know. =P. If they can't swing the 32, perhaps have #17-32 in a pre-Blizzcon tournament and give like 4 seeds out of those 16 so they at least have a shot.
If it's a big deal for Kespa players to go to Blizzcon, then they need to go to tournaments across the world and compete for points there. They have the GSL - it's a shame there aren't more individual leagues in Korea (like the OSL) running alongside them.
If Kespa doesn't send its players to foreign tournaments enough, that's THEIR problem. They shouldn't be given WCS points for PL just because they don't send their players out, even if it is a money issue.
If the players don't like it, they can do what so many have done, and join a foreign team, where they can compete across the world for WCS points - less prestige, aye, but more $$$, and it is a job after all.
THAT SAID, GSL does award more prize money, so perhaps it could award more WCS points too. But that'd be hard to do without making some baseless judgements about how difficult the competition is.
If this happens it would be beyond stupid. Team competition should not be allowed to count towards an individual event such as WCS. Plus teams can manipulate who plays when and against who etc
On September 16 2014 05:23 Kevn23 wrote: The easiest way to fix this is to have the top 32 in WCS points participate at Blizzcon. All problems solved.
I think this idea is actually pretty good, if changed a bit. In Snooker there's the following system:
The world championship has 32 players participating. At the end of the year, the top 16 players in the world ranking are seeded to the world championship. Then the world ranking 17-96 play for the remaining 16 spots, in such a way, that the players ranked 81st to 96th play a match against the players ranked 65th to 80th. The winners play against the ranks 49th to 64th, the winners of these matches play against the ranks 33rd to 48th, the winners of these matches against the ranks 17th to 32nd and the winners of these matches play at the world championship against the top 16 players, who are seeded.
I think adopting this system would give nearly all players that gained points in the wcs system the chance to compete at blizzcon as long as they are good enough to get through the top seeds, while the ranking still maintains a pretty good advantage for the better ranked players, because they have to win feewer rounds to get to the world finals.
On September 16 2014 04:24 Caihead wrote: How can people possibly see this as unfair? Committing to playing in proleague is a far bigger commitment than going to any of these weekend tournaments that give massive points, why would you not reward points for the most competitive team league? How is it fair exactly that players in proleague commit months of their time often forsaking individual league showings yet get nothing for it?
To be fair, proleague players don't exactly get "nothing" for their time. Kespa team salaries are way, way above what any other teams give. Top proleague players earn $70k-$100k a year as their base salary. On the other hand they have much less opportunity to win big chunks at a time in individual leagues. In contrast a player on a foreign team makes significantly less as a stable salary, but they have much more opportunity to accumulate prize money. Despite this someone making $70k-$100k as their base salary is still going to be making more money than all but a very very few of the top performers on the international circuit.
Essentially the players in proleague have chosen to go for the stable, safe job where most of them will earn more lifetime then they would have on a foreign team, as opposed to the high risk, high reward job of a foreign team, where you might be able to have more excitement and moments of personal glory but ultimately you are living a life of high variance and low stability.
Im not saying this to disagree with your main point, I'm not sure exactly where I stand on this yet. But to say proleague players commit months of their time yet get nothing for it implies that their job is strictly worse than that of international competitors. In reality they are akin to the stable office worker who works long hours and earns a steady and reliable wage and can live their life based off that fact, where international players are more like self employed entrepreneurs who have freedom and excitement and higher earning potential but could possibly wake up tomorrow and find out they have nothing.
On September 16 2014 05:34 Larkin wrote: SYMPATHY POINTS
If it's a big deal for Kespa players to go to Blizzcon, then they need to go to tournaments across the world and compete for points there. They have the GSL - it's a shame there aren't more individual leagues in Korea (like the OSL) running alongside them.
If Kespa doesn't send its players to foreign tournaments enough, that's THEIR problem. They shouldn't be given WCS points for PL just because they don't send their players out, even if it is a money issue.
If the players don't like it, they can do what so many have done, and join a foreign team, where they can compete across the world for WCS points - less prestige, aye, but more $$$, and it is a job after all.
THAT SAID, GSL does award more prize money, so perhaps it could award more WCS points too. But that'd be hard to do without making some baseless judgements about how difficult the competition is.
That's absolutely the wrong attitude to carry. Blizzard shouldn't be like "These are the rules, with no consideration taken for the health of the scene". They need to cooperate and accommodate for everybody to be happy and things to work out. If you intentionally fuck Kespa over with your point of view, only bad things will happen. Kespa players have commitments to Proleague, do you know what this means? It's not stubbornness or ignorance, they are locked in to play in the league, which means they have little opportunity to go abroad.
If WCS is meant to identify the top 16 players in the world, changes need to be made - because clearly, some less-than-great players are going this year, and some of the undisputed greatest players are not. Blaming their "lack of willingness to travel" is stupid and shortsighted. Changes to the system has to be done to accommodate their situation.
whatever goes man, totally neutral on this. blizzard sets the rules and players that have a desire to succeed in wcs follow. one doesn't have to be a kespa player and one doesn't have to be a wcs player. just adaptation and life choices
On September 16 2014 05:34 Larkin wrote: SYMPATHY POINTS
If it's a big deal for Kespa players to go to Blizzcon, then they need to go to tournaments across the world and compete for points there. They have the GSL - it's a shame there aren't more individual leagues in Korea (like the OSL) running alongside them.
If Kespa doesn't send its players to foreign tournaments enough, that's THEIR problem. They shouldn't be given WCS points for PL just because they don't send their players out, even if it is a money issue.
If the players don't like it, they can do what so many have done, and join a foreign team, where they can compete across the world for WCS points - less prestige, aye, but more $$$, and it is a job after all.
THAT SAID, GSL does award more prize money, so perhaps it could award more WCS points too. But that'd be hard to do without making some baseless judgements about how difficult the competition is.
That's absolutely the wrong attitude to carry. Blizzard shouldn't be like "These are the rules, with no consideration taken for the health of the scene". They need to cooperate and accommodate for everybody to be happy and things to work out. If you intentionally fuck Kespa over with your point of view, only bad things will happen. Kespa players have commitments to Proleague, do you know what this means? It's not stubbornness or ignorance, they are locked in to play in the league, which means they have little opportunity to go abroad.
If WCS is meant to identify the top 16 players in the world, changes need to be made - because clearly, some less-than-great players are going this year, and some of the undisputed greatest players are not. Blaming their "lack of willingness to travel" is stupid and shortsighted. Changes to the system has to be done to accommodate their situation.
I wasn't saying it was stubborness or ignorance - I was saying that, by playing in PL, they are stopping themselves from playing in other leagues. That's their decision to make. PL has a lot of money and a lot of prestige in it for winning - if you have to sacrifice WCS points for that, I think it's fair enough. They shouldn't be given points just because "oh, you poor things, having to play in PL... have some points too so you can come to Blizzcon and all the hard work other players have done travelling across the world is meaningless".
I like the idea of having more players at Blizzcon or more competing for seeds. The snooker model posted above actually seems really good. It would certainly make WCS more inclusive and more 'World' rather than just 15 Koreans and maybe 1 foreigner (Naniwa, Snute).
I think it is totally reasonable. The players that do the best in Proleague are the ones who tend to do well in other competitions as well or the ones that we would like to see being sent overseas more often anyways.
To all those FlaSh fanboys out there who are against this... he would probably be going to blizzcon if this was a thing this year...
Interesting. Proleague is certainly a very competitive league and rewarding players who perform well with WCS points makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, since all players are chosen by the coaches, it's basically an invite-only tournament, so I hope they don't give out too many points for it.
That's cool and all, but KR simply needs more tournaments, and those tournaments need more viewers to justify them. The Korean scene is way to big to be supported by the viewership.
this might sound weird but i think WCS points for ladder is okay. Like lets say top 8 non-barcode of each region gets WCS points at end of season. It will encourage barcodes to unmask their identity, more progamers will stream and it will make ladder extremely competitive. I'm not sure how points should be allocated since the skill difference is quite noticable though. The downside might be players wintrading and cheating to win
WCS points for a team league feels very wrong to me.
They just need to stop allowing invitational tournaments giving WCS points (g3, homestorycup, lone star clash, ASUS ROG, etc) Only tournaments with open brackets and/or with 100% of the players coming from some sort of qualification are allowed to give WCS points, like MLG, Dreamhack and WCS KR/AM/EU. IEM would need to be tweaked a bit, since there's invites seeded in the ro16 and the open brackets have very few slots
With less points being handed for (almost) free to the players who can travel all the time, and less tournaments giving points, Kespa players just need to find a way of going to 1 or 2 of them through the year to grab points (aside from doing well in WCS KR).
This way they can actually compete in the WCS rankings with people like liquid players, jaedong, mc, hyun, polt, bomber who go to almost every tournament and benefit of these invitationals
Someone should do a 'revised' WCS rankings, excluding points given from tournaments full of invites to see the difference
problem is, rewarding PL with WCS-Points would be unfair within the korean scene:
1. If you're living in korea, not playing on a rich foreign or a Proleague-Team, you're fucked up 2. If you're a mediocre star of a weak team (MKP and Creator), you'll get sent out quite often while a top player on a really strong team might get sent out less because of high in-team competition 3. There is no clear way to qualify for playing in PL if you're in a participating team. The coach decides, not the players skill in the moment of competition
Of course good PL-Players would benefit from this and it would be fair in the global scene skillwise. But potentially good players that have no legit way to proof their skill wouldn't benefit from this despite being perhaps just as skilled.
It's sad that Koreans feel they need to leave Korea to continue their career; but who can blame them? Sure, traveling is common in other careers as well, but it's usually more of an option. These kids are pretty much forced to move away from their families and everything they know just to keep up with the system, and that's sad imo.
Traveling for tournaments is one thing, having to move completely is a problem (and it's a problem that really only Koreans have to deal with at the moment). Ironically, this is a role-reversal since you had to move to Korea to play Brood War professionally (and look how well that worked out :D).
JUST travel and collect WCS points like every1 else does over many international tournaments....if u dont want to travel and play comfortablely at home ( KOREA) and still want to collect enough WCS point to go BLITZCON then it seem unfair to those korean and foreigner must travel alots to get there or not even get there...
On September 16 2014 07:05 dungsieu wrote: JUST travel and collect WCS points like every1 else does over many international tournaments....if u dont want to travel and play comfortablely at home ( KOREA) and still want to collect enough WCS point to go BLITZCON then it seem unfair to those korean and foreigner must travel alots to get there or not even get there...
and right now its fair that blizzcon participation is basically determined by who has the most travelling money and the most open schedule? instead of, you know, skill in starcraft?
On September 16 2014 07:05 dungsieu wrote: JUST travel and collect WCS points like every1 else does over many international tournaments....if u dont want to travel and play comfortablely at home ( KOREA) and still want to collect enough WCS point to go BLITZCON then it seem unfair to those korean and foreigner must travel alots to get there or not even get there...
and right now its fair that blizzcon participation is basically determined by who has the most travelling money and the most open schedule? instead of, you know, skill in starcraft?
the consequence of your words is to remove WCS points from any event that is not the original WCS league. which is quite a good thing imo
On September 15 2014 19:48 SatedSC2 wrote: This would be terrible.
WCS points are part of the build up to Blizzard's premier individual competition. They shouldn't be given out in a team competition.
Not only that, but it basically gives points to a tournament that most of the playerbase cannot participate in
The problem this year has been that the top players have been participating in Proleague which has limited their ability to play in WCS tournaments. The result is that some of the best players in the world have been unable to qualify for Blizzcon. A lot of players don't participate in Proleague, yes, but they have a lot of opportunity to earn points elsewhere. It's no coincidence that the majority of the top 16 have not played in Proleague this year.
You guys are acting as if they're giving 3v3 and 4v4 ladder players WCS points. Performing well in Proleague takes a lot of individual skill which should be rewarded just as much as killing foreigners at random Dreamhacks.
On September 16 2014 07:00 fronkschnonk wrote: problem is, rewarding PL with WCS-Points would be unfair within the korean scene:
1. If you're living in korea, not playing on a rich foreign or a Proleague-Team, you're fucked up 2. If you're a mediocre star of a weak team (MKP and Creator), you'll get sent out quite often while a top player on a really strong team might get sent out less because of high in-team competition 3. There is no clear way to qualify for playing in PL if you're in a participating team. The coach decides, not the players skill in the moment of competition
Of course good PL-Players would benefit from this and it would be fair in the global scene skillwise. But potentially good players that have no legit way to proof their skill wouldn't benefit from this despite being perhaps just as skilled.
There's no perfect system since the scene is so fragmented and all. For example, we see that well-traveled players like Hyun, Taeja or Jaedong score big in the current system, but aside from Taeja it would be hard to say that they are the world's best players.
If the aim of the Blizzcon WCS tournament is to find the 16 most skilled players in the world, then the results from this year's competitions irrevocably proves that a change is needed.
It's a shame that some of the best players in the world, KeSPA's most famous and skilled aces, are not well represented in WCS standings because it is without doubt that they are the most skilled players in their world.
Their nature of the sponsor's priorities and the limited, extremely difficult nature of earning WCS points in the Korean region is the biggest problem with the WCS system right now. It's inarguable that the system does not account for how much more difficult it is to earn points in the KR region. Players would love to go to weekend tournaments and destroy foreigners to get easy WCS points, but the reality is that due to KeSPA's interests, teams are not allowed to ship their players around the world them when their sponsorship companies place the highest priority on Proleague.
Some may say "Well, why don't their quit their teams, join a foreign team, fly around the world earning WCS points in tournaments instead?" We answer ourselves, why should the best players in the world leave their salaried, stable jobs to game a points system that leads against its own directive (16 best players at Blizzcon)?
The solution is not to destroy the structure of the Korean team houses and tournaments; instead, we should build a system which accounts for the reality of the scene and not a far-fetched ideal where the stars of the most skilled region should give up their legacies and livelihoods to earn positions in an end of year tournament which they, as the best Starcraft players, belong in.
Fans need to realize that the lifestyle and stability of being on a sponsored team in Korea has predated the WCS system. Pro-gamers should not have to give up their hard earned, stable homes and salaries to accommodate a system that results has proven broken. The stability and structure of these team houses is what every region should be looking to build, not destroy.
At least eight of the current top sixteen of WCS do not belong there if our aim is to accumulate the best players in the world for our end of season tournament. It is unrealistic to expect Proleague's stars to fly around the world to play in non-WCS tournaments that award points. Instead, we should allow KeSPA's stars the same opportunity that NA/EU pros enjoy and design a system which will earn them as many points as a foreign star such as Jaedong, MC or San would through non-WCS events.
A lot of people are looking at this all wrong. Arguments like "It's a team league and wcs is not." Is by itself not a good reason.
First we need to establish what the goal of the blizzcon/wcs final is. If it's to host a tournament with this years best players than there's a reason for awarding points to PL. There are a lot of good players there who don't get the opportunity to play in a lot of wcs points awarding tournaments. Whether it's the fault of kespa, the teams, tournament organizers or Blizzard doesn't really matter. We're working towards a goal. If the goal is to have the top players from each region play each other. Well we pretty much got that already imo. (5AM, 6EU, 5KR). I thinks it's really that simple what is our goal how do we get there.
tl;dr If we want the best players in the world at Blizzcon yes. If we want an AM vs EU vs KR then no.
Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
I am surprised this isn't mentioned more often, but there are flaws with any methodology you adopt.
I've long thought a complete calendar rework is worth a shot. Coordinating may prove impossible, but a rigidly defined season with chunks allocated for Proleague, WCS events and weekend tournaments could prove beneficial.
With say, a defined period for Proleague this would let Kespa players focus on it, with the potential of travelling once that period elapses. As things stand tournaments all overlap and players frequently have to prioritise tournaments rather too often for my tastes.
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
Then watch streams and Dreamhack, IEM, etc.
That's not the point of the Blizzcon tournament.
what is the point of blizzcon then? is there a source of blizzard literally saying "the point of blizzcon is to host the 16 most skilled players"?
awarding points based on separate competitions players can choose to attend or not attend or may have issues attending is never ever going to result in "the 16 most skilled players." the best you could do for that would be an invitational and that would open up even more of a shitstorm when the community thinks the #16 spot should have gone to #17 or gripes about no chance for foreigners etc
On September 16 2014 08:43 Wombat_NI wrote: I am surprised this isn't mentioned more often, but there are flaws with any methodology you adopt.
I've long thought a complete calendar rework is worth a shot. Coordinating may prove impossible, but a rigidly defined season with chunks allocated for Proleague, WCS events and weekend tournaments could prove beneficial.
With say, a defined period for Proleague this would let Kespa players focus on it, with the potential of travelling once that period elapses. As things stand tournaments all overlap and players frequently have to prioritise tournaments rather too often for my tastes.
Good point, the Proleague season currently begins right before the new WCS year and ends about 2-3 months before Blizzcon. Not much time to make use of their freedom from PL.
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
Then watch streams and Dreamhack, IEM, etc.
That's not the point of the Blizzcon tournament.
what is the point of blizzcon then? is there a source of blizzard literally saying "the point of blizzcon is to host the 16 most skilled players"?
awarding points based on separate competitions players can choose to attend or not attend or may have issues attending is never ever going to result in "the 16 most skilled players." the best you could do for that would be an invitational and that would open up even more of a shitstorm when the community thinks the #16 spot should have gone to #17 or gripes about no chance for foreigners etc
"After much discussion and collaboration with our partners, we've developed a new tournament series with a cohesive structure and unified global point ranking system that ties major StarCraft II competition together. The StarCraft II WCS will give eSports fans an exciting, globe-circling story to follow throughout the year
[...]
Using a unified ranking system to track player performance across multiple seasons and events will help make it easier to clearly identify the world's best StarCraft II players, and make it so everyone can follow along with their favorite players as stories and events unfold. Every match will carry added excitement, and every outcome will be more meaningful."
From my understanding, they just wanted to tie all the already existing tournaments together.
EDIT: Allow me to clarify: it seems that the point of WCS is to encourage players and viewers alike to pay attention to the various tournaments going on in the StarCraft II scene by giving those tournaments additional value as a qualification method for Blizzcon, and thus helping to sustain the scene. By this understanding Blizzcon exists specifically to discourage players from staying in their corner and not participating in the overall scene. In other words, what people are criticising most about it is specifically its reason for existing.
if kespa wants to get more wcs points, they should make more tourneys in korea i think... It would also provide more tourneys in korea in general which can only help the scene there.
I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
On September 15 2014 20:00 shabby wrote: Much rather have more individual tournaments based in Korea, than rewarding WCS points for something that has nothing to do with individual performances, and that 99% of players cannot participate in (no, its not the same as MLG/DH/IEM, because everyone "can" participate, if they travel).
Exactly. Awarding WCS points for Proleague is not the solution to this problem, another individual league to complement GSL is.
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
Then watch streams and Dreamhack, IEM, etc.
That's not the point of the Blizzcon tournament.
what is the point of blizzcon then? is there a source of blizzard literally saying "the point of blizzcon is to host the 16 most skilled players"?
awarding points based on separate competitions players can choose to attend or not attend or may have issues attending is never ever going to result in "the 16 most skilled players." the best you could do for that would be an invitational and that would open up even more of a shitstorm when the community thinks the #16 spot should have gone to #17 or gripes about no chance for foreigners etc
"After much discussion and collaboration with our partners, we've developed a new tournament series with a cohesive structure and unified global point ranking system that ties major StarCraft II competition together. The StarCraft II WCS will give eSports fans an exciting, globe-circling story to follow throughout the year
[...]
Using a unified ranking system to track player performance across multiple seasons and events will help make it easier to clearly identify the world's best StarCraft II players, and make it so everyone can follow along with their favorite players as stories and events unfold. Every match will carry added excitement, and every outcome will be more meaningful."
From my understanding, they just wanted to tie all the already existing tournaments together.
EDIT: Allow me to clarify: it seems that the point of WCS is to encourage players and viewers alike to pay attention to the various tournaments going on in the StarCraft II scene by giving those tournaments additional value as a qualification method for Blizzcon, and thus helping to sustain the scene. By this understanding Blizzcon exists specifically to discourage players from staying in their corner and not participating in the overall scene. In other words, what people are criticising most about it is specifically its reason for existing.
So Blizzcon goals go directly against the fundamentals of Proleague. It's a shame imo, because I think the KR scene is what we should be looking up to develop in the foreign world, not to mention that Proleague is probably the only thing that keeps the KR scene together...
On September 15 2014 20:00 shabby wrote: Much rather have more individual tournaments based in Korea, than rewarding WCS points for something that has nothing to do with individual performances, and that 99% of players cannot participate in (no, its not the same as MLG/DH/IEM, because everyone "can" participate, if they travel).
Exactly. Awarding WCS points for Proleague is not the solution to this problem, another individual league to complement GSL is.
making posts like "the solution is to add another league" without actually going into details of who would create and sponsor the league is pointless. hey guys the solution isnt a region lock, its to invent teleportation so there are no regions anymore. why hasnt david kim invented teleportation yet
i think some fans need a reality check on how relevant this scene is, how much you can accomplish and when the right time is to compromise on the best solution thats actually possible rather than begging jesus for miracles
I was really hoping that the KeSPA president was hinting at a new individual league like GSL/OSL (rip ) when he said that there will be more opportunities for Koreans to earn WCS points next year.
WCS points for Proleague is a ridiculous policy and a lazy band-aid over a problem which runs much deeper (not enough tournaments in Korea). Having WCS points in Proleague is also something that is going to influence the coaches' decisions that should not be relevant in a team league.
On September 15 2014 20:00 shabby wrote: Much rather have more individual tournaments based in Korea, than rewarding WCS points for something that has nothing to do with individual performances, and that 99% of players cannot participate in (no, its not the same as MLG/DH/IEM, because everyone "can" participate, if they travel).
Exactly. Awarding WCS points for Proleague is not the solution to this problem, another individual league to complement GSL is.
making posts like "the solution is to add another league" without actually going into details of who would create and sponsor the league is pointless. hey guys the solution isnt a region lock, its to invent teleportation so there are no regions anymore. why hasnt david kim invented teleportation yet
i think some fans need a reality check on how relevant this scene is, how much you can accomplish and when the right time is to compromise on the best solution thats actually possible rather than begging jesus for miracles
Blizzard in collaboration with KeSPA and SPOTV. It's Blizzard who have created this fragile situation in Korea with the implementation of a region lock so really it should be them who make sure the safeguard (new individual league) is in place to protect the Korean scene from this decision.
On September 16 2014 09:42 Crot4le wrote: I was really hoping that the KeSPA president was hinting at a new individual league like GSL/OSL (rip ) when he said that there will be more opportunities for Koreans to earn WCS points next year.
WCS points for Proleague is a ridiculous policy and a lazy band-aid over a problem which runs much deeper (not enough tournaments in Korea). Having WCS points in Proleague is also something that is going to influence the coaches' decisions that should not be relevant in a team league.
yup.. having WCS points for Proleague further widens the gap between foreign and korean scene. it totally discourages any kespa player to travel completely...
On September 15 2014 20:00 shabby wrote: Much rather have more individual tournaments based in Korea, than rewarding WCS points for something that has nothing to do with individual performances, and that 99% of players cannot participate in (no, its not the same as MLG/DH/IEM, because everyone "can" participate, if they travel).
Exactly. Awarding WCS points for Proleague is not the solution to this problem, another individual league to complement GSL is.
making posts like "the solution is to add another league" without actually going into details of who would create and sponsor the league is pointless. hey guys the solution isnt a region lock, its to invent teleportation so there are no regions anymore. why hasnt david kim invented teleportation yet
i think some fans need a reality check on how relevant this scene is, how much you can accomplish and when the right time is to compromise on the best solution thats actually possible rather than begging jesus for miracles
Blizzard in collaboration with KeSPA and SPOTV. It's Blizzard who have created this fragile situation in Korean with the implementation of a region lock so really it should be them who make sure the safeguard (new individual league) is in place to protect the Korean scene from this decision.
Yes! This is what I've been waiting for. I understand why everyone is so against Proleague giving out WCS points, but honestly have you guys watched the games? Many of the Proleague matches have been, from my perspective, the most entertaining to watch of any SC2 event. The league contains a high concentration of by far the best players on the planet, and I genuinely feel like it's a win for everyone involved. The best players in the world get rewarded for their hard work, Blizzard gets to have the best players in the world as a part of the WCS finals, KeSPA gets more exposure of their players, and the fans get the most entertaining matches from the most high-level players. The only downside is getting over the moral technicality that this is a "team league". That may be true, but it still depends on individual performances, and I'm sure the points will be awarded on such a basis (with possible small additional incentives for team success). I sincerely hope they give WCS points for Proleague--who knows, it may actually provide enough incentive for a foreign team to join and actually take it seriously.
On September 16 2014 10:36 Ingenero wrote: Yes! This is what I've been waiting for. I understand why everyone is so against Proleague giving out WCS points, but honestly have you guys watched the games? Many of the Proleague matches have been, from my perspective, the most entertaining to watch of any SC2 event. The league contains a high concentration of by far the best players on the planet, and I genuinely feel like it's a win for everyone involved. The best players in the world get rewarded for their hard work, Blizzard gets to have the best players in the world as a part of the WCS finals, KeSPA gets more exposure of their players, and the fans get the most entertaining matches from the most high-level players. The only downside is getting over the moral technicality that this is a "team league". That may be true, but it still depends on individual performances, and I'm sure the points will be awarded on such a basis (with possible small additional incentives for team success). I sincerely hope they give WCS points for Proleague--who knows, it may actually provide enough incentive for a foreign team to join and actually take it seriously.
a lot of people think that proleague achievements cannot be judged on an individual meritocratic basis because of the elements of map preparation or whatever. while i understand their logic i still find it a bit silly because to dominate in proleague you still have to consistently whip the cream of the crop of korean players on one of the biggest stages and at one of the highest levels. it's not as if they're playing 2v2s. if you can give equal points to wcs am/eu champion in the current system then i don't see how it's so different to give points to players who win 1v1 games in a proleague format. yeah ok its a different environment but so is beating WCS AM challenger compared to code A
and i find it doubly silly that TB is against "team league achievements for 1v1 points" considering he ran a mixed format league with starbow, 2v2s, community maps etc o_O what's so wrong with recognizing players' achievements in various formats as long as the games played are still unmodded 1v1s?
and i find it doubly silly that TB is against "team league achievements for 1v1 points" considering he ran a mixed format league with starbow, 2v2s, community maps etc o_O what's so wrong with recognizing players' achievements in various formats as long as the games played are still unmodded 1v1s?
"I'm going to somehow equivocate a casual $500 a match format focused on doing different stuff to usual to fucking Proleague with WCS points, that'll be a strong argument! - Nobody ever.
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
Then watch streams and Dreamhack, IEM, etc.
That's not the point of the Blizzcon tournament.
what is the point of blizzcon then? is there a source of blizzard literally saying "the point of blizzcon is to host the 16 most skilled players"?
awarding points based on separate competitions players can choose to attend or not attend or may have issues attending is never ever going to result in "the 16 most skilled players." the best you could do for that would be an invitational and that would open up even more of a shitstorm when the community thinks the #16 spot should have gone to #17 or gripes about no chance for foreigners etc
"After much discussion and collaboration with our partners, we've developed a new tournament series with a cohesive structure and unified global point ranking system that ties major StarCraft II competition together. The StarCraft II WCS will give eSports fans an exciting, globe-circling story to follow throughout the year
[...]
Using a unified ranking system to track player performance across multiple seasons and events will help make it easier to clearly identify the world's best StarCraft II players, and make it so everyone can follow along with their favorite players as stories and events unfold. Every match will carry added excitement, and every outcome will be more meaningful."
From my understanding, they just wanted to tie all the already existing tournaments together.
EDIT: Allow me to clarify: it seems that the point of WCS is to encourage players and viewers alike to pay attention to the various tournaments going on in the StarCraft II scene by giving those tournaments additional value as a qualification method for Blizzcon, and thus helping to sustain the scene. By this understanding Blizzcon exists specifically to discourage players from staying in their corner and not participating in the overall scene. In other words, what people are criticising most about it is specifically its reason for existing.
So Blizzcon goals go directly against the fundamentals of Proleague. It's a shame imo, because I think the KR scene is what we should be looking up to develop in the foreign world, not to mention that Proleague is probably the only thing that keeps the KR scene together...
I have no experience with business matters of this level, so I'm just speculating, but the way I understand it, it makes a lot of sense for Blizzard. I mean, their goal is for StarCraft to stay popular so they can keep selling games, so it doesn't matter much to them whether Blizzcon or IEM or GSL or the Proleague Grand Finals or whatever is the most hyped tournament of the year, so long as the hype exists at all. With WCS, the best players who travel to the most tournaments get to compete for the grand prize, so it encourages good players to go to as many tournaments as possible, thus increasing the overall quality of the scene, and generating more hype overall. From that perspective, WCS has been a great success. The foreigner-to-Korean ratio of tournaments has decreased a lot, and the foreigners still participating are a lot better than they used to be. They wanted as many good players as possible at as many tournaments as possible because they figured that would make the scene more stable.
From this perspective, these protectionism methods also make sense. People are excited to see foreigners, so they institute region-locking to give foreigners better chances. People like to see KeSPA players who rarely leave their little bubble, so they want to give points to Proleague to give those players better chances. It all seems to be about maximising the popularity of StarCraft.
If you want to award WCS points to SPL, the worst I'd allow is to give a flat # of points to every player on a proleague team, maaayyybe a few extra for the winning teams.
None of this individual win stuff, I don't want more short-sighted WCS crap ruining my leagues.
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
Then watch streams and Dreamhack, IEM, etc.
That's not the point of the Blizzcon tournament.
what is the point of blizzcon then? is there a source of blizzard literally saying "the point of blizzcon is to host the 16 most skilled players"?
awarding points based on separate competitions players can choose to attend or not attend or may have issues attending is never ever going to result in "the 16 most skilled players." the best you could do for that would be an invitational and that would open up even more of a shitstorm when the community thinks the #16 spot should have gone to #17 or gripes about no chance for foreigners etc
"After much discussion and collaboration with our partners, we've developed a new tournament series with a cohesive structure and unified global point ranking system that ties major StarCraft II competition together. The StarCraft II WCS will give eSports fans an exciting, globe-circling story to follow throughout the year
[...]
Using a unified ranking system to track player performance across multiple seasons and events will help make it easier to clearly identify the world's best StarCraft II players, and make it so everyone can follow along with their favorite players as stories and events unfold. Every match will carry added excitement, and every outcome will be more meaningful."
From my understanding, they just wanted to tie all the already existing tournaments together.
EDIT: Allow me to clarify: it seems that the point of WCS is to encourage players and viewers alike to pay attention to the various tournaments going on in the StarCraft II scene by giving those tournaments additional value as a qualification method for Blizzcon, and thus helping to sustain the scene. By this understanding Blizzcon exists specifically to discourage players from staying in their corner and not participating in the overall scene. In other words, what people are criticising most about it is specifically its reason for existing.
So Blizzcon goals go directly against the fundamentals of Proleague. It's a shame imo, because I think the KR scene is what we should be looking up to develop in the foreign world, not to mention that Proleague is probably the only thing that keeps the KR scene together...
I have no experience with business matters of this level, so I'm just speculating, but the way I understand it, it makes a lot of sense for Blizzard. I mean, their goal is for StarCraft to stay popular so they can keep selling games, so it doesn't matter much to them whether Blizzcon or IEM or GSL or the Proleague Grand Finals or whatever is the most hyped tournament of the year, so long as the hype exists at all. With WCS, the best players who travel to the most tournaments get to compete for the grand prize, so it encourages good players to go to as many tournaments as possible, thus increasing the overall quality of the scene, and generating more hype overall. From that perspective, WCS has been a great success. The foreigner-to-Korean ratio of tournaments has decreased a lot, and the foreigners still participating are a lot better than they used to be. They wanted as many good players as possible at as many tournaments as possible because they figured that would make the scene more stable.
From this perspective, these protectionism methods also make sense. People are excited to see foreigners, so they institute region-locking to give foreigners better chances. People like to see KeSPA players who rarely leave their little bubble, so they want to give points to Proleague to give those players better chances. It all seems to be about maximising the popularity of StarCraft.
Yeah I think by awarding WCS points to PL they are trying to reward players so they can do good in WCS without invading other regions, so this along with the region lock encourages the players to stay at home. Makes sense.
I feel bad for Axiom tho, they're getting the worst of both things (region lock and points awarded to PL) and none of the benefits.
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
Surely you don't believe this. How can it be a method of "allowing Kespa to catch up" AND a creates a scenario where "non-Kespa has to travel more to catch up". If there's a difference between point accessibility, one side has to catch up, not both. The PL point introduction would flatten the playing field more than it current is (which is heavily skewed against Kespa). I think it's reasonable to assume the Proleague points wouldn't be so grossly inflated that allows a sole-proleague player to have a realistic chance at going to Blizzcon for it.
I don't think Proleague is going to be equivalent to the two dozen+ major/premier tournaments that everybody else was going to attend anyway (of which Kespa will probably continue to not attend).
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
Then watch streams and Dreamhack, IEM, etc.
That's not the point of the Blizzcon tournament.
what is the point of blizzcon then? is there a source of blizzard literally saying "the point of blizzcon is to host the 16 most skilled players"?
awarding points based on separate competitions players can choose to attend or not attend or may have issues attending is never ever going to result in "the 16 most skilled players." the best you could do for that would be an invitational and that would open up even more of a shitstorm when the community thinks the #16 spot should have gone to #17 or gripes about no chance for foreigners etc
"After much discussion and collaboration with our partners, we've developed a new tournament series with a cohesive structure and unified global point ranking system that ties major StarCraft II competition together. The StarCraft II WCS will give eSports fans an exciting, globe-circling story to follow throughout the year
[...]
Using a unified ranking system to track player performance across multiple seasons and events will help make it easier to clearly identify the world's best StarCraft II players, and make it so everyone can follow along with their favorite players as stories and events unfold. Every match will carry added excitement, and every outcome will be more meaningful."
From my understanding, they just wanted to tie all the already existing tournaments together.
EDIT: Allow me to clarify: it seems that the point of WCS is to encourage players and viewers alike to pay attention to the various tournaments going on in the StarCraft II scene by giving those tournaments additional value as a qualification method for Blizzcon, and thus helping to sustain the scene. By this understanding Blizzcon exists specifically to discourage players from staying in their corner and not participating in the overall scene. In other words, what people are criticising most about it is specifically its reason for existing.
So Blizzcon goals go directly against the fundamentals of Proleague. It's a shame imo, because I think the KR scene is what we should be looking up to develop in the foreign world, not to mention that Proleague is probably the only thing that keeps the KR scene together...
I have no experience with business matters of this level, so I'm just speculating, but the way I understand it, it makes a lot of sense for Blizzard. I mean, their goal is for StarCraft to stay popular so they can keep selling games, so it doesn't matter much to them whether Blizzcon or IEM or GSL or the Proleague Grand Finals or whatever is the most hyped tournament of the year, so long as the hype exists at all. With WCS, the best players who travel to the most tournaments get to compete for the grand prize, so it encourages good players to go to as many tournaments as possible, thus increasing the overall quality of the scene, and generating more hype overall. From that perspective, WCS has been a great success. The foreigner-to-Korean ratio of tournaments has decreased a lot, and the foreigners still participating are a lot better than they used to be. They wanted as many good players as possible at as many tournaments as possible because they figured that would make the scene more stable.
From this perspective, these protectionism methods also make sense. People are excited to see foreigners, so they institute region-locking to give foreigners better chances. People like to see KeSPA players who rarely leave their little bubble, so they want to give points to Proleague to give those players better chances. It all seems to be about maximising the popularity of StarCraft.
Yeah I think by awarding WCS points to PL they are trying to reward players so they can do good in WCS without invading other regions, so this along with the region lock encourages the players to stay at home. Makes sense.
I feel bad for Axiom tho, they're getting the worst of both things (region lock and points awarded to PL) and none of the benefits.
Nah, I think Blizzard would love to have KeSPA players go abroad and invade as many tournaments as possible, but since they're clearly not going to, they need to donate points so they can at least get them to Blizzcon.
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
Surely you don't believe this. How can it be a method of "allowing Kespa to catch up" AND a creates a scenario where "non-Kespa has to travel more to catch up". If there's a difference between point accessibility, one side has to catch up, not both. The PL point introduction would flatten the playing field more than it current is (which is heavily skewed against Kespa). I think it's reasonable to assume the Proleague points wouldn't be so grossly inflated that allows a sole-proleague player to have a realistic chance at going to Blizzcon for it.
I don't think Proleague is going to be equivalent to the two dozen+ major/premier tournaments that everybody else was going to attend anyway (of which Kespa will probably continue to not attend).
You're incorrectly assuming that one is either KeSPA or non-Korean. There are plenty of Korean players not signed onto a KeSPA team.
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
Then watch streams and Dreamhack, IEM, etc.
That's not the point of the Blizzcon tournament.
what is the point of blizzcon then? is there a source of blizzard literally saying "the point of blizzcon is to host the 16 most skilled players"?
awarding points based on separate competitions players can choose to attend or not attend or may have issues attending is never ever going to result in "the 16 most skilled players." the best you could do for that would be an invitational and that would open up even more of a shitstorm when the community thinks the #16 spot should have gone to #17 or gripes about no chance for foreigners etc
"After much discussion and collaboration with our partners, we've developed a new tournament series with a cohesive structure and unified global point ranking system that ties major StarCraft II competition together. The StarCraft II WCS will give eSports fans an exciting, globe-circling story to follow throughout the year
[...]
Using a unified ranking system to track player performance across multiple seasons and events will help make it easier to clearly identify the world's best StarCraft II players, and make it so everyone can follow along with their favorite players as stories and events unfold. Every match will carry added excitement, and every outcome will be more meaningful."
From my understanding, they just wanted to tie all the already existing tournaments together.
EDIT: Allow me to clarify: it seems that the point of WCS is to encourage players and viewers alike to pay attention to the various tournaments going on in the StarCraft II scene by giving those tournaments additional value as a qualification method for Blizzcon, and thus helping to sustain the scene. By this understanding Blizzcon exists specifically to discourage players from staying in their corner and not participating in the overall scene. In other words, what people are criticising most about it is specifically its reason for existing.
So Blizzcon goals go directly against the fundamentals of Proleague. It's a shame imo, because I think the KR scene is what we should be looking up to develop in the foreign world, not to mention that Proleague is probably the only thing that keeps the KR scene together...
I have no experience with business matters of this level, so I'm just speculating, but the way I understand it, it makes a lot of sense for Blizzard. I mean, their goal is for StarCraft to stay popular so they can keep selling games, so it doesn't matter much to them whether Blizzcon or IEM or GSL or the Proleague Grand Finals or whatever is the most hyped tournament of the year, so long as the hype exists at all. With WCS, the best players who travel to the most tournaments get to compete for the grand prize, so it encourages good players to go to as many tournaments as possible, thus increasing the overall quality of the scene, and generating more hype overall. From that perspective, WCS has been a great success. The foreigner-to-Korean ratio of tournaments has decreased a lot, and the foreigners still participating are a lot better than they used to be. They wanted as many good players as possible at as many tournaments as possible because they figured that would make the scene more stable.
From this perspective, these protectionism methods also make sense. People are excited to see foreigners, so they institute region-locking to give foreigners better chances. People like to see KeSPA players who rarely leave their little bubble, so they want to give points to Proleague to give those players better chances. It all seems to be about maximising the popularity of StarCraft.
Yeah I think by awarding WCS points to PL they are trying to reward players so they can do good in WCS without invading other regions, so this along with the region lock encourages the players to stay at home. Makes sense.
I feel bad for Axiom tho, they're getting the worst of both things (region lock and points awarded to PL) and none of the benefits.
Nah, I think Blizzard would love to have KeSPA players go abroad and invade as many tournaments as possible, but since they're clearly not going to, they need to donate points so they can at least get them to Blizzcon.
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
Surely you don't believe this. How can it be a method of "allowing Kespa to catch up" AND a creates a scenario where "non-Kespa has to travel more to catch up". If there's a difference between point accessibility, one side has to catch up, not both. The PL point introduction would flatten the playing field more than it current is (which is heavily skewed against Kespa). I think it's reasonable to assume the Proleague points wouldn't be so grossly inflated that allows a sole-proleague player to have a realistic chance at going to Blizzcon for it.
I don't think Proleague is going to be equivalent to the two dozen+ major/premier tournaments that everybody else was going to attend anyway (of which Kespa will probably continue to not attend).
You're incorrectly assuming that one is either KeSPA or non-Korean. There are plenty of Korean players not signed onto a KeSPA team.
There's kind of a strangeness to having WCS points in Proleague, depending on how the points will be distributed. Will it be team-based or individual? Will it be meritocratic per match or will overall rankings summed over the course of Proleague be used? Will there be weights on certain matches (like the ace match, playoffs, etc.)?
An interesting thing to note is that this can inflate teamleaguers' scores higher than they should be; there are a few players who excel at the BO1 way of the teamleague format, but don't do as well in extended series. Not sure if that's significant, just interesting.
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
You guys have 5 players, time to make a MOBA team.
On September 16 2014 08:33 ninjamyst wrote: Is Blizzcon about the top BEST players in terms of skills or top POPULAR players that are also very good (but may not be the best)?? I rather watch popular players than relatively unknown "best" players. You have to think "general" audience. Alot of people posting here wanting to see the "best" in skills are only a small percentage of Blizzard's target audience...
Then watch streams and Dreamhack, IEM, etc.
That's not the point of the Blizzcon tournament.
what is the point of blizzcon then? is there a source of blizzard literally saying "the point of blizzcon is to host the 16 most skilled players"?
awarding points based on separate competitions players can choose to attend or not attend or may have issues attending is never ever going to result in "the 16 most skilled players." the best you could do for that would be an invitational and that would open up even more of a shitstorm when the community thinks the #16 spot should have gone to #17 or gripes about no chance for foreigners etc
"After much discussion and collaboration with our partners, we've developed a new tournament series with a cohesive structure and unified global point ranking system that ties major StarCraft II competition together. The StarCraft II WCS will give eSports fans an exciting, globe-circling story to follow throughout the year
[...]
Using a unified ranking system to track player performance across multiple seasons and events will help make it easier to clearly identify the world's best StarCraft II players, and make it so everyone can follow along with their favorite players as stories and events unfold. Every match will carry added excitement, and every outcome will be more meaningful."
From my understanding, they just wanted to tie all the already existing tournaments together.
EDIT: Allow me to clarify: it seems that the point of WCS is to encourage players and viewers alike to pay attention to the various tournaments going on in the StarCraft II scene by giving those tournaments additional value as a qualification method for Blizzcon, and thus helping to sustain the scene. By this understanding Blizzcon exists specifically to discourage players from staying in their corner and not participating in the overall scene. In other words, what people are criticising most about it is specifically its reason for existing.
So Blizzcon goals go directly against the fundamentals of Proleague. It's a shame imo, because I think the KR scene is what we should be looking up to develop in the foreign world, not to mention that Proleague is probably the only thing that keeps the KR scene together...
I have no experience with business matters of this level, so I'm just speculating, but the way I understand it, it makes a lot of sense for Blizzard. I mean, their goal is for StarCraft to stay popular so they can keep selling games, so it doesn't matter much to them whether Blizzcon or IEM or GSL or the Proleague Grand Finals or whatever is the most hyped tournament of the year, so long as the hype exists at all. With WCS, the best players who travel to the most tournaments get to compete for the grand prize, so it encourages good players to go to as many tournaments as possible, thus increasing the overall quality of the scene, and generating more hype overall. From that perspective, WCS has been a great success. The foreigner-to-Korean ratio of tournaments has decreased a lot, and the foreigners still participating are a lot better than they used to be. They wanted as many good players as possible at as many tournaments as possible because they figured that would make the scene more stable.
From this perspective, these protectionism methods also make sense. People are excited to see foreigners, so they institute region-locking to give foreigners better chances. People like to see KeSPA players who rarely leave their little bubble, so they want to give points to Proleague to give those players better chances. It all seems to be about maximising the popularity of StarCraft.
Yeah I think by awarding WCS points to PL they are trying to reward players so they can do good in WCS without invading other regions, so this along with the region lock encourages the players to stay at home. Makes sense.
I feel bad for Axiom tho, they're getting the worst of both things (region lock and points awarded to PL) and none of the benefits.
Nah, I think Blizzard would love to have KeSPA players go abroad and invade as many tournaments as possible, but since they're clearly not going to, they need to donate points so they can at least get them to Blizzcon.
On September 16 2014 11:32 Zenbrez wrote:
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
Surely you don't believe this. How can it be a method of "allowing Kespa to catch up" AND a creates a scenario where "non-Kespa has to travel more to catch up". If there's a difference between point accessibility, one side has to catch up, not both. The PL point introduction would flatten the playing field more than it current is (which is heavily skewed against Kespa). I think it's reasonable to assume the Proleague points wouldn't be so grossly inflated that allows a sole-proleague player to have a realistic chance at going to Blizzcon for it.
I don't think Proleague is going to be equivalent to the two dozen+ major/premier tournaments that everybody else was going to attend anyway (of which Kespa will probably continue to not attend).
You're incorrectly assuming that one is either KeSPA or non-Korean. There are plenty of Korean players not signed onto a KeSPA team.
Sorry, you are right. Wasn't thinking of this in the correct scope.
Who are these korean players who are 1. not going to foreign events right now 2. not on a kespa team
And would they be even relevant for a top 16 anyway?
If you have noticed, there are a lot of really good Korean players that don't have a lot of WCS points because they are playing in proleague. Currently, do any of you believe that Bunny, who is a fantastic player, is better than Parting? I doubt many people would take that bet but that is what the rankings show as of today as Bunny is 22nd and Parting is 42nd.
To try to more accurately reflect who may be better, if Proleague did give some WCS points for winning, this would lessen that gap. Yes there would be even more Koreans in the top 16 but does that matter? I want to see the best players, not just the players that traveled to all the Dreamhacks.
To further support this, take a look at how Davis Cup runs alongside the ATP World Tour. For a long time in tennis, playing Davis Cup gave no points to competing players. Now, if you win, you get some points. Not a lot, but some. I think that following this model is better than not following it.
Only the best teams should have a shot at it. But honestly I don't see it being that attractive for foreign team, entire team roster to stay in Korea and giving up the foreign scene is a great expense
The fact that a player like Snute will probably get in over players like Soo, Rain, and Maru is evidence enough that the WCS point system needs radical changes, if it is to truly display the worlds 16 best players.
Without season finals, I see no other way of ensuring the foreigners get weeded out of Blizzcon besides giving more points to Korea.
Also, if individual tournaments opened up in Korea, foreigners would literally not have a shot. They probably wouldn't even come.
I don't understand why Totalbiscuit is mad, because none of his Axiom players are even close to Code S level. They would get whooped in GSL, PL, or an individual tournament in Korea. Region lock made it so they can't beat up on foreigners and koreigners. I think Axiom is going to die regardless, but don't blame it on this. The players simply aren't that good.
I thought one big aspect of Blizzcon was to bring top players from different regions together. If it was about the best 16 skilled players, then go watch GSL or Proleague. The current system is fair because Kespa is not limited to just GSL and Proleague. They have the resource to send players to foreign events just as TL, Axiom, other teams with Korean players sent their players to foreign events. All this bullshit about Proleague taking more preparation are just lame excuses. Why should Blizzard cater to Kespa? Why do they get special treatment?
I like the idea of rewarding WCS points to MVPs, which are usually players that don't go to foreign tournaments. It's less an issue I think of demeaning Proleague and more about getting Kespa players out of the country.
For those of you who think this will ruin Proleague because certain players will be favored, you are wrong. Proleague isn't based on all-kills like GSTL was AND Proleague is an institution that will not be messed with. Consider how OSL and MSL have died but Proleague still lives on for that organization.
What if there was an 8-man tournament at the end of each round for the top PL performers and like 500 WCS points for the winner, so there'd be at least an additional 2000 points of first-place finishing goodness in Korea? I don't terribly like WCS points given out for a purely team-based competition.
On September 15 2014 19:48 SatedSC2 wrote: This would be terrible.
WCS points are part of the build up to Blizzard's premier individual competition. They shouldn't be given out in a team competition.
The only rebuttal necessary for this argument is that under the current WCS structure Jaedong is scheduled to attend.
That's all.
The current system is very flawed. It is in dire need of adjustment.
JD won 2 tournaments and three 3/4 finishes in 2014. That seems pretty good to me. What kind of ridiculous standards are you going by?
If you attend every tournament going and are pretty good you'll pick up points here and there. HerO has had a monster slump, by far the worst shape I remember him in and he's sitting around in 20th
I can't believe so many people being against the 'unfairness' of WCS points for PL when people are picking up points by getting invited to tournaments and dropping out early. Both are pretty wonky in ways, but at least in the case of PL WCS point allocation it's to mitigate a problem for those players.
Yes it'd be nice to have more tournaments IN Korea, the Kespa cup was pretty sick. I feel Kespa should have let their players go to WEC or whatever it was called in China so they're not blameless but you can't expect them to find a ton of tournies out of their own pocket to make up for the WCS points issues.
Personally I'm ok with PL points, as it helps those players out even if not an ideal solution at all.
giving out individual points for a team league is kind of silly, but i guess it'd be good to actually reward people who perform well over time in a large enough sample size, rather than whoever runs best over any given sunday in a crapshoot like 100% of all wcs point awarding events
On September 16 2014 12:52 ninjamyst wrote: I thought one big aspect of Blizzcon was to bring top players from different regions together. If it was about the best 16 skilled players, then go watch GSL or Proleague. The current system is fair because Kespa is not limited to just GSL and Proleague. They have the resource to send players to foreign events just as TL, Axiom, other teams with Korean players sent their players to foreign events. All this bullshit about Proleague taking more preparation are just lame excuses. Why should Blizzard cater to Kespa? Why do they get special treatment?
Because as it is now the system is fucked. Arguably the three best players in the world arent in top 16 (if you go by the power rank). This is a huge problem both for kespa and blizzard. Its a problem for blizzard because their tournament is in no way going to be the most competitive and interesting of the year and its a problem for kespa since they get less exposure for the sponsors. Now why does blizzard care about kespa? Because sc2 needs the korean scene. If kespa and their infrastructure goes down, sc2 most pobably is going to disappear with it along with a big chunk of foreign fans of korean sc2.
On September 16 2014 16:11 Skynx wrote: This is no solution to prevent the likes of Hyun from topping the table.
and why should it? if they give proleague players a fair shot at earning points through domestic play but still leave the field open for popular international players to travel around making a name for themselves and winning their way into the finals then i think that's a perfect setup. your MCs and Hyuns will still get the rightful place they deserve for being marketable, but the glut of talent in proleague won't be pigeonholed into the dilemma of proleague vs wcs points anymore.
Pretty much all depends on how you distribute the points. We never want a situation, where a team specifically sends out one player, to get that player enough points to go to BlizzCon. There does need to be more emphasis on teamleagues in SC2, so this move would help legitimize it and make it more possible for future team leagues to make the cut and possibly become point worthy, thus making team rolsters more important. Also Korea needs more tournaments that give points as a whole.
On September 16 2014 10:36 Ingenero wrote: Yes! This is what I've been waiting for. I understand why everyone is so against Proleague giving out WCS points, but honestly have you guys watched the games? Many of the Proleague matches have been, from my perspective, the most entertaining to watch of any SC2 event. The league contains a high concentration of by far the best players on the planet, and I genuinely feel like it's a win for everyone involved. The best players in the world get rewarded for their hard work, Blizzard gets to have the best players in the world as a part of the WCS finals, KeSPA gets more exposure of their players, and the fans get the most entertaining matches from the most high-level players. The only downside is getting over the moral technicality that this is a "team league". That may be true, but it still depends on individual performances, and I'm sure the points will be awarded on such a basis (with possible small additional incentives for team success). I sincerely hope they give WCS points for Proleague--who knows, it may actually provide enough incentive for a foreign team to join and actually take it seriously.
Yes. I never even watched Proleague til it became strictly SC2. Great games and moments came out this year and with all the lack of events in Korea, it only makes sense to give them WCS Points. A ton more Koreans will be able to get points when they normally only have GSL to hope for. Maybe have a weekly online tourney that gave out points in Korea would be nice too. We wouldn't even be worrying about WCS points if it wasn't for Blizzard's hostile take over of the scene. It's such a broken system and they're doing everything to keep whats left together and "working". It's WCS points that we don't have two premier individual leagues in Korea. Korea was where the best played and if you won GSL you were considered the best Korean/Player in the world. Why would you take months to crown a champion, to only push him out the next week with another long dragged out tournament. Blizzard should study NASCAR and The Chase. Actually, I think all of eSports should be looking to NASCAR and emulate what they did. Fast growing sport in America.
On September 16 2014 16:31 ejozl wrote: Pretty much all depends on how you distribute the points. We never want a situation, where a team specifically sends out one player, to get that player enough points to go to BlizzCon.
1) they'd still have to win to get the points. what's the difference between a team sending out a player to get wins and someone like MC or Hyun farming foreigners across Europe?
2)anyone in korea who is going to have enough or near enough points to go to blizzcon will be a regular proleague player anyway.
On September 16 2014 16:31 ejozl wrote: Pretty much all depends on how you distribute the points. We never want a situation, where a team specifically sends out one player, to get that player enough points to go to BlizzCon.
1) they'd still have to win to get the points. what's the difference between a team sending out a player to get wins and someone like MC or Hyun farming foreigners across Europe?
2)anyone in korea who is going to have enough or near enough points to go to blizzcon will be a regular proleague player anyway.
Just to add onto point 1: proleague teams already send out their best players, because even without WCS point incentive, they do everything they can to win.
On September 15 2014 19:48 SatedSC2 wrote: This would be terrible.
WCS points are part of the build up to Blizzard's premier individual competition. They shouldn't be given out in a team competition.
yep,
also i feel like all this korean tournaments ONLY for koreans should not give any points at all (even wec etc) because koreans also travel to foreign tournaments to get points, and get them in the kor only too thats just ... wrong on so many levels
I really don't get the hate that Blizzard is getting for such a pragmatic solution.
- WCS points should reward individual play, not team play : no, WCS points should reward skilled players, regardless of them playing in individual or team leagues - This would encourage suboptimal PL coach decisions : no, it can be entirely avoided by setting up a correct point structure. For example, 50 points for each win, 25 points for each loss. Being fielded every single game may be counterproductive when compared to sniping specific opponents - This is unfair, non-KR players can't get these points : no, let's be pragmatic, it's not like everyone can access all WCS points anyways. Currently the main winners of WCS are people who get sent to every tournament (Hyun, Jjakji, Snute, MC...). And if you don't want to be pragmatic, don't forget StatePrime
Just to add onto point 1: proleague teams already send out their best players, because even without WCS point incentive, they do everything they can to win.
C'mon there's much more strategy to the teamleagues than this. The things points could have effect on; consider if KT wants Flash at Blizzcon and lets say he's very few points from getting there. They might send out snipers to take out the big shot, from the other team, to ensure Flash sweeping the rest of the team that is not a threat. We could have a situation where a player will be sent out, even though it's probably not the best choice. It's just more variables that can sway the coach.
Just make the WCS main event be:
top 4 proleague performers. top 4 korean region on WCS points. top 4 EU region on WCS points. top 4 US region on WCS points.
Why should Korea have more spots by default than other entire regions? BlizzCon is about crowning the World Champion, this includes all of the World.
We need more "korean Koreans" at Blizzcon. If PL gives WCS points i´m in for that. But i wish that not only 16 but 32 players could participate at Blizzcon... :-/
IF, and only IF Blizzard wants WCS to be a truely fair tournament to determine the world's best player, they should make one tournament for each region (region locked!) and remove all WCS points that do not come from original WCS. There'll always be unfairness else.
Another approach would be to split points: a) points from WCS only (eg WCS AM), b) points from WCS tournaments, eg. Dreamhack/IEM. Instead of having 3 global finals per year, we could have 3 local finals, the "global final", the true one, would be Blizzcon then.
4 spots WCS KR 4 spots WCS AM 4 spots WCS EU 4 spots WCS tournaments
But don't start giving WCS points for restricted team leagues.
I think there is a number of better ways to achieve better representation of the highest-skilled players in the finals:
- More Korean-based tournaments with WCS points (open to the whole world of course, just like DHs and IEMs, but we know they are almost dominated by Korea-based Koreans. - Now that the regions are locked, a system skewing the # of places in the finals for each region according to this region's players' performance in past finals, much like Europe sending more teams to the football world cup than Asia. - Most importantly, work primarily with KeSPA but also other tournament organizers. The purpose would be to integrate proleague and WCS-points tournaments in a set schedule without conflicts AND to encourage KeSPA to change their stance on sending players to other tournaments. This would probably stop the bleeding of major players from KeSPA (which, of course, remains to be confirmed - we don't yet know for sure if all these major names will end up in non-KeSPA teams).
On the other hand, rewarding players for their performance in a closed team league is a clumsy and reactive patch. Although I would LOVE to see the 2 finalists of Proelague and the 2 winners of the most prestigious team leagues outside of Proleague to meet for a team WCS finals in Blizzcon.
And, of course, for me the biggest problem remains the fact that the best players from different regions (MC, Hyun, Taeja, Polt, Rain, Parting, Soo, Flash etc) do not meet often enough throughout the year.
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
Well at least people can stop complaining about the illegitimacy of WCS rankings if this happens. I really don't like it, as proleague is not an open tournament and not even an individual tournament. It really has very little to do with WCS.
On September 16 2014 17:28 ejozl wrote:The things points could have effect on; consider if KT wants Flash at Blizzcon and lets say he's very few points from getting there. They might send out snipers to take out the big shot, from the other team, to ensure Flash sweeping the rest of the team that is not a threat.
except proleague only uses the all-kill format for the playoffs, baring a(nother) change. and lets pretend in some magical world 1) KT will tailor their entire strategy around Flash, and 2) that they wouldn't normally do this--so what? Flash still has to beat proleague players, which is a shit load more to ask of him than at least half of the people that will be at blizzcon this year. so it's ok for jjakji to beat local players at Dreamhack X, but not ok for Flash to beat the best players in the world?
I don't think there's any viable 100 % fair structure that accommodates every player in every part of the world. That said, awarding points for a team league seems dubious at best.
Just to add onto point 1: proleague teams already send out their best players, because even without WCS point incentive, they do everything they can to win.
C'mon there's much more strategy to the teamleagues than this. The things points could have effect on; consider if KT wants Flash at Blizzcon and lets say he's very few points from getting there. They might send out snipers to take out the big shot, from the other team, to ensure Flash sweeping the rest of the team that is not a threat. We could have a situation where a player will be sent out, even though it's probably not the best choice. It's just more variables that can sway the coach.
The goal of WCS has never been to find the 16 best players in the world and have them compete at blizzcon. The goal appears to have always have been (whether stated or not) to find the best players from each of the 3 regions and then have them compete. Personally I have always felt that such a goal works better if they picked the top 32 but I understand both the time and financial constraints that limit there ability to do this.
In a perfect world though it would be 32 people you could have your foreigner hype with most being out in first 2 rounds with 1-2 possibly making it to the Ro8 and adding some exciting underdog elements to everything and setting up a terrific grand final.
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
On September 15 2014 19:48 SatedSC2 wrote: This would be terrible.
WCS points are part of the build up to Blizzard's premier individual competition. They shouldn't be given out in a team competition.
yep,
also i feel like all this korean tournaments ONLY for koreans should not give any points at all (even wec etc) because koreans also travel to foreign tournaments to get points, and get them in the kor only too thats just ... wrong on so many levels
By that logic should we force foreigners to play in Korean tournaments to get WCS points? It's not a Korean tournament only for koreans, it's a korean tournament foreign teams feel is too much of a financial commitment to play in in terms of risk-reward and since the level of competition is so high. There's dozens of small Foreign offlines I'm sure Kespa players would love to play in for easy money, but it's just not economically feasible.
On September 15 2014 19:48 SatedSC2 wrote: This would be terrible.
WCS points are part of the build up to Blizzard's premier individual competition. They shouldn't be given out in a team competition.
yep,
also i feel like all this korean tournaments ONLY for koreans should not give any points at all (even wec etc) because koreans also travel to foreign tournaments to get points, and get them in the kor only too thats just ... wrong on so many levels
WCS is a system to find the WORLD CHAMPION, not the fans favourite, deal with it
On September 16 2014 17:28 ejozl wrote:The things points could have effect on; consider if KT wants Flash at Blizzcon and lets say he's very few points from getting there. They might send out snipers to take out the big shot, from the other team, to ensure Flash sweeping the rest of the team that is not a threat.
except proleague only uses the all-kill format for the playoffs, baring a(nother) change. and lets pretend in some magical world 1) KT will tailor their entire strategy around Flash, and 2) that they wouldn't normally do this--so what? Flash still has to beat proleague players, which is a shit load more to ask of him than at least half of the people that will be at blizzcon this year. so it's ok for jjakji to beat local players at Dreamhack X, but not ok for Flash to beat the best players in the world?
The issue is not that this player gets to go to Blizzcon, but that it delegitimizes Proleague, even if just a bit.
On reflection I wish Blizzard had just tweaked the first WCS format a bit and weighted the numbers of finals representatives a bit heavier towards Korea.
I felt WCS EU finals was one of the best tournaments I can recall despite lacking the very, very best players.
does people want foreign tournaments (dreamhack, red bull, iem) to have zero kespa players throughout the year and then have the kespa gods show up in wcs global finals?
surely if i was making something like 6000$ per month i would treat myself an airline ticket to a foreign event or two.
it's nice as a foreigner to get the chance to play against kespa more than once per year.
On September 16 2014 21:40 Liquid`Snute wrote: does people want foreign tournaments (dreamhack, red bull, iem) to have zero kespa players throughout the year and then have the kespa gods show up in wcs global finals?
surely if i was making something like 6000$ per month i would treat myself an airline ticket to a foreign event or two.
it's nice as a foreigner to get the chance to play against kespa more than once per year.
I mean cleary KeSPA's #1 priority is SPL, so they cannot attend during that.
But, I think that I'd would have been great if KeSPA could partner up with ESL, DreamHacks etc. and constantly keep sending their players to those events after SPL season ends, August through December.
Similar to when they partnered up with MLG way back in 2012.
Edit: also you wouldn't have players like Rain and PartinG leaving SKT in order to have that experience.
On September 16 2014 21:40 Liquid`Snute wrote: does people want foreign tournaments (dreamhack, red bull, iem) to have zero kespa players throughout the year and then have the kespa gods show up in wcs global finals?
surely if i was making something like 6000$ per month i would treat myself an airline ticket to a foreign event or two.
it's nice as a foreigner to get the chance to play against kespa more than once per year.
I mean cleary KeSPA's #1 priority is SPL, so they cannot attend during that.
But, I think that I'd would have been great if KeSPA could partner up with ESL, DreamHacks etc. and constantly keep sending their players to those events after SPL season ends, August through December.
Similar to when they partnered up with MLG way back in 2012.
Edit: also you wouldn't have players like Rain and PartinG leaving SKT in order to have that experience.
Yes when players apparently feel like they have to leave KeSPA in order to experience foreign events i can't help but feel like we've missed the mark at some point.
On September 16 2014 21:40 Liquid`Snute wrote: does people want foreign tournaments (dreamhack, red bull, iem) to have zero kespa players throughout the year and then have the kespa gods show up in wcs global finals?
surely if i was making something like 6000$ per month i would treat myself an airline ticket to a foreign event or two.
it's nice as a foreigner to get the chance to play against kespa more than once per year.
I mean cleary KeSPA's #1 priority is SPL, so they cannot attend during that.
But, I think that I'd would have been great if KeSPA could partner up with ESL, DreamHacks etc. and constantly keep sending their players to those events after SPL season ends, August through December.
Similar to when they partnered up with MLG way back in 2012.
Edit: also you wouldn't have players like Rain and PartinG leaving SKT in order to have that experience.
This only existed because kespa player weren't allowed to play other Foreigner tournaments, MLG wanted this exclusiveness.
On September 15 2014 19:57 Dunmer wrote: Yes they should be given to these players. You have so many players performing amazingly in pro league and missing out on foreign events because they chose to focus on this tournament. SoO isn't guranteed a blizzcon spot despite two final appearances, he deserves more points in the form of his pro league performance to help guarantee a spot
They don't want to participate in the system, they don't get to qualify for the rewards the system gives. Pretty simple.
On September 15 2014 19:57 Dunmer wrote: Yes they should be given to these players. You have so many players performing amazingly in pro league and missing out on foreign events because they chose to focus on this tournament. SoO isn't guranteed a blizzcon spot despite two final appearances, he deserves more points in the form of his pro league performance to help guarantee a spot
They don't want to participate in the system, they don't get to qualify for the rewards the system gives. Pretty simple.
While that is true, maybe the system itself is pretty bad
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
Debatable, if I lock myself up and only come out once a year, I have a pretty huge advantage over people that travel around and don't have as much time training. It might make me the best for a tiny moment in the whole year. But the World Champion is about the whole year. And gathering points belongs into that ordeal of becoming the world champion. If they give the "best at sc2" points for free, they will have an unfair advantage, because there is less material about them to analyze and they also had more time to hone their skills. It would be okay to increase the points in a region based on how difficult it is for them to travel etc. But not because they choose to not travel.
But the best player varies from person to person because people value things differently. For me for example you can't be the best player if you can't win weekend tournaments and only do well in drawn out tournaments or the other way round. Especially since Blizzcon is a weekender for the most part. And I don't want people participate that don't care about getting enough points and usually do bad at weekenders anyway.
My biggest reason against PL points though is that I would prefer more tournaments in the korean region. And it seems neither Blizzard nor Kespa want to sink money there. I guess both fear that Taeja wouldn't retire for real and win them anyway.
My biggest reason against PL points though is that I would prefer more tournaments in the korean region. And it seems neither Blizzard nor Kespa want to sink money there. I guess both fear that Taeja wouldn't retire for real and win them anyway.
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
WCS is already about flying to as many tournaments as possible.
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
WCS is already about flying to as many tournaments as possible.
On September 10 2014 19:27 sagi wrote: Giving points to Proleague might be the best way to compensate KeSPA players who can't attend smaller tournaments due to scheduling conflicts. It could also allocate points in much more even way among larger playerbase (around 4-5 players per team) in contrast to the "top few takes it all" of GSL/WCS.
Lets say a map win in PL grants you 20 points. This would have totaled 11100 points in this year making it almost equivalent of a single WCS tournament. However if we look at the stats for this year most players wouldn't get that much points.
As you can see this isn't a lot. Taking this into consideration even more points might be reasonable to make the point pool for the best players reflect atleast the structure of a tier 2 event. Naturally other scenarios could also work like giving top X players of each PL round some fixed amount of points. This however would most likely be a top heavy distribution and might tie players to PL even more (we had some players taking breaks this year to go to foreign events).
Thus the problem would be determining what is the right amount of points and how to divide them among the players. Even a small boost might help the very best to reach the finals. Also, from the current rules' point of view we have to remember that PL is not an open league. If I remember correctly, to award points they should be accessible to everyone through qualifiers.
Why would Proleague players need to be compensated for not participating in other tournaments? It's their choice to do that. What makes them worth more than others to get exceptions?
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
WCS is already about flying to as many tournaments as possible.
And be invited to most of them, not even qualify.
name a tournament mc or hyun were invited to which they wouldn't have qualified for otherwise
On September 15 2014 20:09 sagi wrote: I'll quote myself from a thread where this got lost in a debate wether Catz thinks people are idiots or not:
On September 10 2014 19:27 sagi wrote: Giving points to Proleague might be the best way to compensate KeSPA players who can't attend smaller tournaments due to scheduling conflicts. It could also allocate points in much more even way among larger playerbase (around 4-5 players per team) in contrast to the "top few takes it all" of GSL/WCS.
Lets say a map win in PL grants you 20 points. This would have totaled 11100 points in this year making it almost equivalent of a single WCS tournament. However if we look at the stats for this year most players wouldn't get that much points.
As you can see this isn't a lot. Taking this into consideration even more points might be reasonable to make the point pool for the best players reflect atleast the structure of a tier 2 event. Naturally other scenarios could also work like giving top X players of each PL round some fixed amount of points. This however would most likely be a top heavy distribution and might tie players to PL even more (we had some players taking breaks this year to go to foreign events).
Thus the problem would be determining what is the right amount of points and how to divide them among the players. Even a small boost might help the very best to reach the finals. Also, from the current rules' point of view we have to remember that PL is not an open league. If I remember correctly, to award points they should be accessible to everyone through qualifiers.
Why would Proleague players need to be compensated for not participating in other tournaments? It's their choice to do that. What makes them worth more than others to get exceptions?
because they're better, people want to see them and the kespa infrastructure makes it unreasonable for them to attend enough international tournaments
i dont get the "its their choice" thing people keep repeating, are we supposed to be letting the players' choices determine how the wcs system works? shouldnt it be about finding the best experience for the fans, not screwing great players because they didnt quit their proleague teams to go to dreamhacks or whatever?
theres this weird anti-korean sentiment i keep seeing where for some reason people dont want to open opportunities to korean players. so when koreans go abroad and win points and beat foreigners people get angry because theyre preying on lower skilled opponents and taking "our" prizes, yet the koreans who stay in korea and commit to playing at the highest levels shouldnt be helped to compete internationally or make it to blizzard's pet finals? why? i would understand if foreigners actually had any chance of winning your dreamhacks, your IEMs, etc, but they dont, theyre just going to lose to taeja/hyun/mc or yoda, true, whichever korean is at the tournament. we get a few minutes of FOREIGN HOPE! when snute is in a late round and then a korean wins anyway. so why are people so adamantly opposed to proleague koreans being helped to compete internationally? i cant understand it unless its literally just resentment toward korean people because of the state of foreign competition
how is it somehow worse for foreigners if maru beats taeja in the finals of a tournament instead of taeja beating hyun?
On September 15 2014 20:09 sagi wrote: I'll quote myself from a thread where this got lost in a debate wether Catz thinks people are idiots or not:
On September 10 2014 19:27 sagi wrote: Giving points to Proleague might be the best way to compensate KeSPA players who can't attend smaller tournaments due to scheduling conflicts. It could also allocate points in much more even way among larger playerbase (around 4-5 players per team) in contrast to the "top few takes it all" of GSL/WCS.
Lets say a map win in PL grants you 20 points. This would have totaled 11100 points in this year making it almost equivalent of a single WCS tournament. However if we look at the stats for this year most players wouldn't get that much points.
As you can see this isn't a lot. Taking this into consideration even more points might be reasonable to make the point pool for the best players reflect atleast the structure of a tier 2 event. Naturally other scenarios could also work like giving top X players of each PL round some fixed amount of points. This however would most likely be a top heavy distribution and might tie players to PL even more (we had some players taking breaks this year to go to foreign events).
Thus the problem would be determining what is the right amount of points and how to divide them among the players. Even a small boost might help the very best to reach the finals. Also, from the current rules' point of view we have to remember that PL is not an open league. If I remember correctly, to award points they should be accessible to everyone through qualifiers.
Why would Proleague players need to be compensated for not participating in other tournaments? It's their choice to do that. What makes them worth more than others to get exceptions?
because they're better, people want to see them and the kespa infrastructure makes it unreasonable for them to attend enough international tournaments
i dont get the "its their choice" thing people keep repeating, are we supposed to be letting the players' choices determine how the wcs system works? shouldnt it be about finding the best experience for the fans, not screwing great players because they didnt quit their proleague teams to go to dreamhacks or whatever?
Erh, no. I'm saying exactly the opposite. I'm saying, the problem is KeSPA not WCS. If they want their players in WCS, or rather if their players want to be in WCS, they should create the opportunities. The point of an organisation like theirs is to support their players and grow the sport right? They can do that either by sending their players to participate in tournaments abroad, like every other player in the world has to do, or by creating more WCS eligible tournaments in Korea for their and other players to compete in.
WCS is created to be a global tournament, filled with players who participate in the global scene. I don't see why it has to bend over backwards to accommodate players who don't participate in that scene. Your idea of "the best experience for the fans" might be to see it turned into KeSPA S 2.0, but mine very much isn't.
On September 15 2014 20:09 sagi wrote: I'll quote myself from a thread where this got lost in a debate wether Catz thinks people are idiots or not:
On September 10 2014 19:27 sagi wrote: Giving points to Proleague might be the best way to compensate KeSPA players who can't attend smaller tournaments due to scheduling conflicts. It could also allocate points in much more even way among larger playerbase (around 4-5 players per team) in contrast to the "top few takes it all" of GSL/WCS.
Lets say a map win in PL grants you 20 points. This would have totaled 11100 points in this year making it almost equivalent of a single WCS tournament. However if we look at the stats for this year most players wouldn't get that much points.
As you can see this isn't a lot. Taking this into consideration even more points might be reasonable to make the point pool for the best players reflect atleast the structure of a tier 2 event. Naturally other scenarios could also work like giving top X players of each PL round some fixed amount of points. This however would most likely be a top heavy distribution and might tie players to PL even more (we had some players taking breaks this year to go to foreign events).
Thus the problem would be determining what is the right amount of points and how to divide them among the players. Even a small boost might help the very best to reach the finals. Also, from the current rules' point of view we have to remember that PL is not an open league. If I remember correctly, to award points they should be accessible to everyone through qualifiers.
Why would Proleague players need to be compensated for not participating in other tournaments? It's their choice to do that. What makes them worth more than others to get exceptions?
because they're better, people want to see them and the kespa infrastructure makes it unreasonable for them to attend enough international tournaments
i dont get the "its their choice" thing people keep repeating, are we supposed to be letting the players' choices determine how the wcs system works? shouldnt it be about finding the best experience for the fans, not screwing great players because they didnt quit their proleague teams to go to dreamhacks or whatever?
Erh, no. I'm saying exactly the opposite. I'm saying, the problem is KeSPA not WCS. If they want their players in WCS, or rather if their players want to be in WCS, they should create the opportunities. The point of an organisation like theirs is to support their players and grow the sport right? They can do that either by sending their players to participate in tournaments abroad, like every other player in the world has to do, or by creating more WCS eligible tournaments in Korea for their and other players to compete in.
WCS is created to be a global tournament, filled with players who participate in the global scene. I don't see why it has to bend over backwards to accommodate players who don't participate in that scene. Your idea of "the best experience for the fans" might be to see it turned into KeSPA S 2.0, but mine very much isn't.
your argument makes no sense because giving points to proleague isnt going to make it 'kespa 2.0." if anything its just going to be the same list except with players like MC and Hyun further toward the middle/bottom and guys like rain or maru appearing, which would be amazing and good. international koreans will still be there, it will just be less easy for them.
what does it matter who "creates the opportunities" when the result is the same? if blizzard has the resources to do it and wants to do it then who gives a fuck whether kespa is making the opportunities? i sure dont. you seem to think there needs to be a duality between "supporting korean scene" and competing internationally and theres no reason for that because blizzard is clearly happy to do it and there is no drawback. what kespa does or what the players do has nothing to do with anything because its better for everyone if proleague players are able to score points. you are arguing against a hallucinated dream scenario where the top 16 is just a list of the top proleague performers and that will obviously never happen, its a paranoid anti-korean nightmare that doesnt exist
both antiforeigner and antikorean fans always seem to dream up this version of the scene where the korean scene is separate and unrelated to "the international scene." it is all tied together. just because you dont care to watch kespa players or some other guy doesnt care to watch foreigners those opinions dont invalidate their relevancy to the scene. they are all important and tying them all closer together is a good thing and a step forward
On September 15 2014 20:09 sagi wrote: I'll quote myself from a thread where this got lost in a debate wether Catz thinks people are idiots or not:
On September 10 2014 19:27 sagi wrote: Giving points to Proleague might be the best way to compensate KeSPA players who can't attend smaller tournaments due to scheduling conflicts. It could also allocate points in much more even way among larger playerbase (around 4-5 players per team) in contrast to the "top few takes it all" of GSL/WCS.
Lets say a map win in PL grants you 20 points. This would have totaled 11100 points in this year making it almost equivalent of a single WCS tournament. However if we look at the stats for this year most players wouldn't get that much points.
As you can see this isn't a lot. Taking this into consideration even more points might be reasonable to make the point pool for the best players reflect atleast the structure of a tier 2 event. Naturally other scenarios could also work like giving top X players of each PL round some fixed amount of points. This however would most likely be a top heavy distribution and might tie players to PL even more (we had some players taking breaks this year to go to foreign events).
Thus the problem would be determining what is the right amount of points and how to divide them among the players. Even a small boost might help the very best to reach the finals. Also, from the current rules' point of view we have to remember that PL is not an open league. If I remember correctly, to award points they should be accessible to everyone through qualifiers.
Why would Proleague players need to be compensated for not participating in other tournaments? It's their choice to do that. What makes them worth more than others to get exceptions?
On September 16 2014 12:52 ninjamyst wrote: I thought one big aspect of Blizzcon was to bring top players from different regions together. If it was about the best 16 skilled players, then go watch GSL or Proleague. The current system is fair because Kespa is not limited to just GSL and Proleague. They have the resource to send players to foreign events just as TL, Axiom, other teams with Korean players sent their players to foreign events. All this bullshit about Proleague taking more preparation are just lame excuses. Why should Blizzard cater to Kespa? Why do they get special treatment?
Because as it is now the system is fucked. Arguably the three best players in the world arent in top 16 (if you go by the power rank). This is a huge problem both for kespa and blizzard. Its a problem for blizzard because their tournament is in no way going to be the most competitive and interesting of the year and its a problem for kespa since they get less exposure for the sponsors. Now why does blizzard care about kespa? Because sc2 needs the korean scene. If kespa and their infrastructure goes down, korean sc2 most pobably is going to disappear with it along with a big chunk of foreign fans of korean sc2.
The only downside is that they'll have to use Blizzard's shitty map pool and they won't use their own maps anymore. Awarding WCS points could creat some problems but with Blizzard's change to the WCS NA, most players participating in Pro League will deserve more points than any player in the WCS NA's challenger league.
If they are allowed to do their own map pool modifications, I'm all for it.
Beside that, Korea needs some easy WCS point to keep the player from retiring once they are out of the GSL.
As it stands right now the WCS point system is a joke-- players like Snute/Jaedong are among the 16 best players in the world? Hell no. Giving points for proleague would help get players like Rain/Flash/Soo/Maru/Soulkey into Blizzcon over players like Snute/Jaedong. What the hell is the problem?
At the end of the day this change would be replacing worse players for better players. Even if there were tournaments in Korea, none of the foreigners and very few of the koreigners would even have a chance of making top 8, so I still don't understand the logic.
On September 16 2014 21:40 Liquid`Snute wrote: does people want foreign tournaments (dreamhack, red bull, iem) to have zero kespa players throughout the year and then have the kespa gods show up in wcs global finals?
surely if i was making something like 6000$ per month i would treat myself an airline ticket to a foreign event or two.
it's nice as a foreigner to get the chance to play against kespa more than once per year.
If you're asking if I want to watch you all in Flash 5 times in a row, or mass swarm hosts in hour long games against HerO, than the answer is a resounding NO
Kespa does have much better talent due to its regimented structure, so I do like this change - the foreign tournament attendees will really have to be consistent - like on the level of Polt, Taeja, HyuN kind of consistent to stay up there with the Kespa crowd.
You want to cheer for foreigners (real ones, not Koreigners)? Sure. But don't expect them to ever crack the top 16 in Blizzcon unless they're able to challenge the A-level Koreans more consistently (Scarlett, Snute). Makes much more sense than the current WCS points system anyway. And at least we won't have to see Catz's preaching of "no mechanical difference" garbage.
Straight up against this. You should not be granting points towards access to a solo league tournament in a team league. That's just absurd.
Then again I still think the WCS system is very poor in and of itself. It helps with putting a proper storyline across the multitudes of tournaments around the world in general but that's about it. Integrating it into Korea in particular heavily undermines the GSL as THE crucial tournament in and of itself.
(Not to mention that KeSPA and its obsession solely with Proleague has been singularly unhealthy for SC2 as a whole given how it forces teams to keep their players "at home" and focused entirely on one team-based tournament that lasts an absurdly long time. As I understood it the point of WCS as a whole was to PREVENT that kind of setup where players get pigeonholed and to encourage wider participation in the scene...hence the points for Dreamhacks, etc.)
On September 15 2014 21:26 Wroshe wrote: hmm, I would be vehemently opposed to this. This would mean that WCS points from here on in are not earned on merit but on whether your coach fields you or not.
It also rubs me the wrong way that people feel a need to compensate people who made a financial choice to sign for a Kespa team, damn well knowing that it would cost them WCS points. They made a choice and it has a disadvantage, oh noes, we must take that disadvantage away!
Yes, currently WCS points are earned on merit and totally not based on who has the most money to send players to events. The current system is totally merit based 100%.
Oh wait, it's money and time based. If you have the time and money, you can go to more events, you can earn more points. If you don't have the time or money, you can't go to events so you can't earn points.
You seem to have a rose tinted view of how the current WCS points system works to the point you ignore how it actually works and imagine that it's currently a merit based system.
Not saying that being opposed is bad, only that your justification is entirely off-base because the current system is not at all merit based.
On September 15 2014 21:26 Wroshe wrote: hmm, I would be vehemently opposed to this. This would mean that WCS points from here on in are not earned on merit but on whether your coach fields you or not.
It also rubs me the wrong way that people feel a need to compensate people who made a financial choice to sign for a Kespa team, damn well knowing that it would cost them WCS points. They made a choice and it has a disadvantage, oh noes, we must take that disadvantage away!
Yes, currently WCS points are earned on merit and totally not based on who has the most money to send players to events. The current system is totally merit based 100%.
Oh wait, it's money and time based. If you have the time and money, you can go to more events, you can earn more points. If you don't have the time or money, you can't go to events so you can't earn points.
You seem to have a rose tinted view of how the current WCS points system works to the point you ignore how it actually works and imagine that it's currently a merit based system.
Not saying that being opposed is bad, only that your justification is entirely off-base because the current system is not at all merit based.
So, you're really trying to tell me that the KeSPA teams are the poor teams without money? Please ... They're directly sponsored by airliners and telecom companies. And time? That's a matter of priorities. If you don't prioritize WCS events over Proleague, I really don't see why you should be eligible for attending the WCS finals.
On September 16 2014 12:52 ninjamyst wrote: I thought one big aspect of Blizzcon was to bring top players from different regions together. If it was about the best 16 skilled players, then go watch GSL or Proleague. The current system is fair because Kespa is not limited to just GSL and Proleague. They have the resource to send players to foreign events just as TL, Axiom, other teams with Korean players sent their players to foreign events. All this bullshit about Proleague taking more preparation are just lame excuses. Why should Blizzard cater to Kespa? Why do they get special treatment?
Because as it is now the system is fucked. Arguably the three best players in the world arent in top 16 (if you go by the power rank). This is a huge problem both for kespa and blizzard. Its a problem for blizzard because their tournament is in no way going to be the most competitive and interesting of the year and its a problem for kespa since they get less exposure for the sponsors. Now why does blizzard care about kespa? Because sc2 needs the korean scene. If kespa and their infrastructure goes down, sc2 most pobably is going to disappear with it along with a big chunk of foreign fans of korean sc2.
Blizzcon with the current top 16 WOULD be the most interesting and stacked tournament of the year. The only one similar was the KeSPA cup, which had for the majority overlapping players with WCS top 16 and a couple of KeSPA B-teamers instead of the extra "foreign Koreans" and 1 foreigner fan favourites. That's much better ... not. A bunch of the best players of the world weren't there either (Maru, Innovation, ...) and some top players dropped out in the first round against "lesser" Koreans (Rain, soO, ...) (which is also part of the reason they're outside the current top 16 incidentally.) So I don't really see Blizzard's "problem".
And a problem for KeSPA? Well, yea, that's a problem for KeSPA. Let them solve it. Plenty of options. I vote for more WCS tournaments in Korea.
My biggest reason against PL points though is that I would prefer more tournaments in the korean region. And it seems neither Blizzard nor Kespa want to sink money there. I guess both fear that Taeja wouldn't retire for real and win them anyway.
Yeah, like he did in KeSPA Cup.
:/ He wasn't in KeSPA Cup. Neither were Maru, Soulkey, Innovation, Life, Solar, ... Damn noobs, all of them.
On September 15 2014 21:26 Wroshe wrote: hmm, I would be vehemently opposed to this. This would mean that WCS points from here on in are not earned on merit but on whether your coach fields you or not.
It also rubs me the wrong way that people feel a need to compensate people who made a financial choice to sign for a Kespa team, damn well knowing that it would cost them WCS points. They made a choice and it has a disadvantage, oh noes, we must take that disadvantage away!
Yes, currently WCS points are earned on merit and totally not based on who has the most money to send players to events. The current system is totally merit based 100%.
Oh wait, it's money and time based. If you have the time and money, you can go to more events, you can earn more points. If you don't have the time or money, you can't go to events so you can't earn points.
You seem to have a rose tinted view of how the current WCS points system works to the point you ignore how it actually works and imagine that it's currently a merit based system.
Not saying that being opposed is bad, only that your justification is entirely off-base because the current system is not at all merit based.
So, you're really trying to tell me that the KeSPA teams are the poor teams without money? Please ... They're directly sponsored by airliners and telecom companies. And time? That's a matter of priorities. If you don't prioritize WCS events over Proleague, I really don't see why you should be eligible for attending the WCS finals.
You are ignoring the way the Korean scene works and seem to think it should work the way the rest of the world does. Dysfuntionally with no real team league, but lots of individual competitions. The whole point is Korea is totally different, and why the hell would a Korea domestic company spend money to send players abroad? "Yay, lets use our marketing money to send Flash to the US, that will bring us lots of sponsorship ROI because of all those Americans who will now sign up with KT... oh wait they can't". JinAir is also a localised low cost brand of Korean Air, because the sponsorship is to promote the brand to relevant people, being Koreans who would fly with the low cost carrier. If it was Korean Air, then it might have more global value to promote players outside Korea.
It seems you don't grasp WHY these companies sponsor proleague teams, and hence why they don't send lots of players abroad. You also only pick out a few teams out of the proleague teams, and ignore the ones with little or no sponsorship. Once again bringing me back to my point, you need money and/or time. You are saying that it's merit based, and then saying that KT or SKT or JinAir could send players to events. What about Prime or MVP? Where's your goddamn meritocracy there when only the rich teams can send players?
You: WCS should continue as a meritocracy and Koreans shouldn't get points just because the coaches decide to play them. My response to you: The current system isn't a meritocracy because you need money to get to events. Your response to that: Rich teams could afford to send players to events.
Right, so we agree? The current WCS system isn't a meritocracy and money is the key driver behind people being able to participate.
Oh, and if the teams decided to send some players to WCS point scoring events, such as IEM, then.. like... wouldn't that be the coaches deciding who gets the points? Just like if you give WCS points for proleague. You haven't made an argument that's strung together with what you are trying to put forward. It's not a meritocracy, it's money driven, and the coaches decide who gets the points in your "ideal" world. In the world where Proleague gives points, it is a meritocracy and coaches decide who gets points. So really, the current system is worse and less equal and equitable than a proposed Proleague-WCS points system.
On September 15 2014 20:09 sagi wrote: I'll quote myself from a thread where this got lost in a debate wether Catz thinks people are idiots or not:
On September 10 2014 19:27 sagi wrote: Giving points to Proleague might be the best way to compensate KeSPA players who can't attend smaller tournaments due to scheduling conflicts. It could also allocate points in much more even way among larger playerbase (around 4-5 players per team) in contrast to the "top few takes it all" of GSL/WCS.
Lets say a map win in PL grants you 20 points. This would have totaled 11100 points in this year making it almost equivalent of a single WCS tournament. However if we look at the stats for this year most players wouldn't get that much points.
As you can see this isn't a lot. Taking this into consideration even more points might be reasonable to make the point pool for the best players reflect atleast the structure of a tier 2 event. Naturally other scenarios could also work like giving top X players of each PL round some fixed amount of points. This however would most likely be a top heavy distribution and might tie players to PL even more (we had some players taking breaks this year to go to foreign events).
Thus the problem would be determining what is the right amount of points and how to divide them among the players. Even a small boost might help the very best to reach the finals. Also, from the current rules' point of view we have to remember that PL is not an open league. If I remember correctly, to award points they should be accessible to everyone through qualifiers.
Why would Proleague players need to be compensated for not participating in other tournaments? It's their choice to do that. What makes them worth more than others to get exceptions?
because they're better, people want to see them and the kespa infrastructure makes it unreasonable for them to attend enough international tournaments
i dont get the "its their choice" thing people keep repeating, are we supposed to be letting the players' choices determine how the wcs system works? shouldnt it be about finding the best experience for the fans, not screwing great players because they didnt quit their proleague teams to go to dreamhacks or whatever?
Erh, no. I'm saying exactly the opposite. I'm saying, the problem is KeSPA not WCS. If they want their players in WCS, or rather if their players want to be in WCS, they should create the opportunities. The point of an organisation like theirs is to support their players and grow the sport right? They can do that either by sending their players to participate in tournaments abroad, like every other player in the world has to do, or by creating more WCS eligible tournaments in Korea for their and other players to compete in.
WCS is created to be a global tournament, filled with players who participate in the global scene. I don't see why it has to bend over backwards to accommodate players who don't participate in that scene. Your idea of "the best experience for the fans" might be to see it turned into KeSPA S 2.0, but mine very much isn't.
your argument makes no sense because giving points to proleague isnt going to make it 'kespa 2.0." if anything its just going to be the same list except with players like MC and Hyun further toward the middle/bottom and guys like rain or maru appearing, which would be amazing and good. international koreans will still be there, it will just be less easy for them.
what does it matter who "creates the opportunities" when the result is the same? if blizzard has the resources to do it and wants to do it then who gives a fuck whether kespa is making the opportunities? i sure dont. you seem to think there needs to be a duality between "supporting korean scene" and competing internationally and theres no reason for that because blizzard is clearly happy to do it and there is no drawback. what kespa does or what the players do has nothing to do with anything because its better for everyone if proleague players are able to score points. you are arguing against a hallucinated dream scenario where the top 16 is just a list of the top proleague performers and that will obviously never happen, its a paranoid anti-korean nightmare that doesnt exist
both antiforeigner and antikorean fans always seem to dream up this version of the scene where the korean scene is separate and unrelated to "the international scene." it is all tied together. just because you dont care to watch kespa players or some other guy doesnt care to watch foreigners those opinions dont invalidate their relevancy to the scene. they are all important and tying them all closer together is a good thing and a step forward
I don't think there needs to be such a duality at all. Every Korean participating in the international scene is more than welcome at Blizzcon as far as I'm concerned, KeSPA player or not. It is after all the grand final of the international season. My problem exist where people want to invent ways to get Koreans at Blizzcon who DON'T participate in the international scene. I haven't seen one convincing argument yet how that "would be better for everyone". Better for those players and KeSPA yes, I fail to see what everyone else gains by it.
My problem isn't Koreans, or even KeSPA Koreans in the international scene at all, I count some among my favourite players. If the WCS top 16 exists out of 16 KeSPA Koreans because they rolled all the the international tournaments for the year then so be it. More power to them.I agree that more integration is good. The problem I have here is Blizzard going out of their way to cater to KeSPA to create that integration, giving artificial advantages to players/teams who can't be bothered to be there the rest of the year. IMO the responsibility falls to KeSPA to integrate themselves and participate in the international scene, not treat it as an afterthought and then get all the rewards at Blizzcon anyway.
On September 15 2014 21:26 Wroshe wrote: hmm, I would be vehemently opposed to this. This would mean that WCS points from here on in are not earned on merit but on whether your coach fields you or not.
It also rubs me the wrong way that people feel a need to compensate people who made a financial choice to sign for a Kespa team, damn well knowing that it would cost them WCS points. They made a choice and it has a disadvantage, oh noes, we must take that disadvantage away!
Yes, currently WCS points are earned on merit and totally not based on who has the most money to send players to events. The current system is totally merit based 100%.
Oh wait, it's money and time based. If you have the time and money, you can go to more events, you can earn more points. If you don't have the time or money, you can't go to events so you can't earn points.
You seem to have a rose tinted view of how the current WCS points system works to the point you ignore how it actually works and imagine that it's currently a merit based system.
Not saying that being opposed is bad, only that your justification is entirely off-base because the current system is not at all merit based.
So, you're really trying to tell me that the KeSPA teams are the poor teams without money? Please ... They're directly sponsored by airliners and telecom companies. And time? That's a matter of priorities. If you don't prioritize WCS events over Proleague, I really don't see why you should be eligible for attending the WCS finals.
You are ignoring the way the Korean scene works and seem to think it should work the way the rest of the world does. Dysfuntionally with no real team league, but lots of individual competitions. The whole point is Korea is totally different, and why the hell would a Korea domestic company spend money to send players abroad? "Yay, lets use our marketing money to send Flash to the US, that will bring us lots of sponsorship ROI because of all those Americans who will now sign up with KT... oh wait they can't". JinAir is also a localised low cost brand of Korean Air, because the sponsorship is to promote the brand to relevant people, being Koreans who would fly with the low cost carrier. If it was Korean Air, then it might have more global value to promote players outside Korea.
It seems you don't grasp WHY these companies sponsor proleague teams, and hence why they don't send lots of players abroad. You also only pick out a few teams out of the proleague teams, and ignore the ones with little or no sponsorship. Once again bringing me back to my point, you need money and/or time. You are saying that it's merit based, and then saying that KT or SKT or JinAir could send players to events. What about Prime or MVP? Where's your goddamn meritocracy there when only the rich teams can send players?
You: WCS should continue as a meritocracy and Koreans shouldn't get points just because the coaches decide to play them. My response to you: The current system isn't a meritocracy because you need money to get to events. Your response to that: Rich teams could afford to send players to events.
Right, so we agree? The current WCS system isn't a meritocracy and money is the key driver behind people being able to participate.
Oh, and if the teams decided to send some players to WCS point scoring events, such as IEM, then.. like... wouldn't that be the coaches deciding who gets the points? Just like if you give WCS points for proleague. You haven't made an argument that's strung together with what you are trying to put forward. It's not a meritocracy, it's money driven, and the coaches decide who gets the points in your "ideal" world. In the world where Proleague gives points, it is a meritocracy and coaches decide who gets points. So really, the current system is worse and less equal and equitable than a proposed Proleague-WCS points system.
I pick out a few teams to make my point? You named 2, out of 8. 2 who are still plenty rich when compared to the majority of the foreign teams. Another of the sponsors is goddamn SAMSUNG. I understand perfectly well how the Korean scene works and why those companies sponsor proleague and don't send players abroad. My point is that they could if they wanted to. Obviously they don't. My point is that given all that, I fail to see why they should get special treatment to get more representation at what is the crowning event of the international scene.
I never said anything about coaches or whatever, I think you're mixing up responses.
On September 17 2014 00:37 Gaskal wrote: Kespa does have much better talent due to its regimented structure, so I do like this change - the foreign tournament attendees will really have to be consistent - like on the level of Polt, Taeja, HyuN kind of consistent to stay up there with the Kespa crowd.
You want to cheer for foreigners (real ones, not Koreigners)? Sure. But don't expect them to ever crack the top 16 in Blizzcon unless they're able to challenge the A-level Koreans more consistently (Scarlett, Snute). Makes much more sense than the current WCS points system anyway. And at least we won't have to see Catz's preaching of "no mechanical difference" garbage.
I've never said there's no mechanical difference, I've said the oppossite, but feel free to twist my words as much as you want
The obvious problem with this is that kespa teams lose much of their incentive to send their players to foregin events.. I don't know if blizzard really wants that, or that if this was forced through by kespa officials.
On September 17 2014 00:04 algue wrote: The only downside is that they'll have to use Blizzard's shitty map pool and they won't use their own maps anymore. Awarding WCS points could creat some problems but with Blizzard's change to the WCS NA, most players participating in Pro League will deserve more points than any player in the WCS NA's challenger league.
If they are allowed to do their own map pool modifications, I'm all for it.
Beside that, Korea needs some easy WCS point to keep the player from retiring once they are out of the GSL.
oh shit I completely forgot about this, that's gonna be sad and a big blow to community mapping (even if it's just the korean scene) again ;_;
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
And when is one best at starcraft 2? When he/she places in the top 16 of that year's WCS? Or when he earns most money? Or when he has most fangirls?
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
And when is one best at starcraft 2? When he/she places in the top 16 of that year's WCS? Or when he earns most money? Or when he has most fangirls?
You just described Zest 3 times. So yes, Zest is the best.
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
And when is one best at starcraft 2? When he/she places in the top 16 of that year's WCS? Or when he earns most money? Or when he has most fangirls?
You just described Zest 3 times. So yes, Zest is the best.
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
And when is one best at starcraft 2? When he/she places in the top 16 of that year's WCS? Or when he earns most money? Or when he has most fangirls?
its based on partly subjective judgment, sure, but the game is stable enough that you don't need to resort to metrics like who's in the wcs top 16, earns the most money or has the most fangirls to determine who is the best player. its impossible to determine exactly who the 16 best players in the world are and that wouldn't be the exact line up we want at blizzcon anyway, but when players like Rain, Maru, Flash and soO are outside the tournament that is supposed to crown the best player of the year there is a problem with the format.
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
And when is one best at starcraft 2? When he/she places in the top 16 of that year's WCS? Or when he earns most money? Or when he has most fangirls?
You just described Zest 3 times. So yes, Zest is the best.
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
And when is one best at starcraft 2? When he/she places in the top 16 of that year's WCS? Or when he earns most money? Or when he has most fangirls?
You just described Zest 3 times. So yes, Zest is the best.
ahahahah Viper you're everywhere! :D
:o You too
Impossible to hide from all the KT fans after SPL finals......
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
And when is one best at starcraft 2? When he/she places in the top 16 of that year's WCS? Or when he earns most money? Or when he has most fangirls?
You just described Zest 3 times. So yes, Zest is the best.
ahahahah Viper you're everywhere! :D
:o You too
Impossible to hide from all the KT fans after SPL finals......
Hey i was a fan long before the finals But i welcome everyone who finally sees the beauty in KT, it is never too late imo :D
On September 15 2014 20:54 Elroi wrote: this would be great for both parts imo. its just stupid that we may have a season finals without maybe the three best players in the world. blizzard can't afford that and neither can kespa.
"Best players in the world". Best at what? Not at WCS point collection, that's for sure.
best at starcraft 2.
And when is one best at starcraft 2? When he/she places in the top 16 of that year's WCS? Or when he earns most money? Or when he has most fangirls?
You just described Zest 3 times. So yes, Zest is the best.
ahahahah Viper you're everywhere! :D
:o You too
Impossible to hide from all the KT fans after SPL finals......
But I've been cheering for KT and Zest since PL started this year!
On September 15 2014 20:11 opisska wrote: WCS points for Proleague is just silly. Time and time again we have seen that people who do amazingly in team leagues (and PL in particular) can comically fail in individual leagues.
Top 10 players in the last Proleague:
Maru herO sOs Flash Rain Bbyong Soulkey Zest RorO PartinG
Other than RorO I think that's a pretty solid individual league list.
On September 15 2014 20:11 opisska wrote: WCS points for Proleague is just silly. Time and time again we have seen that people who do amazingly in team leagues (and PL in particular) can comically fail in individual leagues.
Top 10 players in the last Proleague:
Maru herO sOs Flash Rain Bbyong Soulkey Zest RorO PartinG
Other than RorO I think that's a pretty solid individual league list.
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
I love Axiom, I've made posters cheering for Axiom players, but I don't really see how this affects Axiom too much.
Even with four players in WCS America, no Axiom player has ever come particularly close to qualifying for Blizzcon. The highest rated Axiom player in 2013 was Alicia, who finished in 29th. The highest rated player in 2014 is Heart, who is sitting in 30th, and would need to win WCS America to have a shot at qualifying.
WCS points only matter for players who are top 16 or close to top 16. In 2013/2014 the lack of region lock and free tickets to other continents through the WCS system meant that Axiom players had an outside chance of getting top 16. In 2015...nah, top 16 is probably not within reach. soO has already demonstrated that you can get 2nd place in the GSL twice in a row, and still not qualify for Blizzcon. So unless you expect an Axiom player to win a GSL or get to the finals twice next year, it's very unlikely that proleague WCS points will bump an Axiom player out of the top 16 WCS points.
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
I love Axiom, I've made posters cheering for Axiom players, but I don't really see how this affects Axiom too much.
Even with four players in WCS America, no Axiom player has ever come particularly close to qualifying for Blizzcon. The highest rated Axiom player in 2013 was Alicia, who finished in 29th. The highest rated player in 2014 is Heart, who is sitting in 30th, and would need to win WCS America to have a shot at qualifying.
WCS points only matter for players who are top 16 or close to top 16. In 2013/2014 the lack of region lock and free tickets to other continents through the WCS system meant that Axiom players had an outside chance of getting top 16. In 2015...nah, top 16 is probably not within reach. soO has already demonstrated that you can get 2nd place in the GSL twice in a row, and still not qualify for Blizzcon. So unless you expect an Axiom player to win a GSL or get to the finals twice next year, it's very unlikely that proleague WCS points will bump an Axiom player out of the top 16 WCS points.
That's why WCS points should be balanced out and used as seeding in tournaments. It gives them more meaning.
On September 18 2014 01:46 metroid composite wrote:
On September 16 2014 09:33 TotalBiscuit wrote: I'm obviously against this from a team point of view. Running a Proleague team is something that isn't financially viable to anyone who doesn't have a big KeSPA sponsor in my honest opinion. While it might compensate for not sending proleague players out of the country to foreign events, it also forces non-Proleague teams to fly out to more foreign events to keep up, not to mention the nonsensical nature of giving out WCS individual points for team efforts.
2015 - Year of "Lets see how many ways we can screw Axiom". Let me know if there's anything else so we can start transitioning to Hearthstone or something.
I love Axiom, I've made posters cheering for Axiom players, but I don't really see how this affects Axiom too much.
Even with four players in WCS America, no Axiom player has ever come particularly close to qualifying for Blizzcon. The highest rated Axiom player in 2013 was Alicia, who finished in 29th. The highest rated player in 2014 is Heart, who is sitting in 30th, and would need to win WCS America to have a shot at qualifying.
WCS points only matter for players who are top 16 or close to top 16. In 2013/2014 the lack of region lock and free tickets to other continents through the WCS system meant that Axiom players had an outside chance of getting top 16. In 2015...nah, top 16 is probably not within reach. soO has already demonstrated that you can get 2nd place in the GSL twice in a row, and still not qualify for Blizzcon. So unless you expect an Axiom player to win a GSL or get to the finals twice next year, it's very unlikely that proleague WCS points will bump an Axiom player out of the top 16 WCS points.
That's why WCS points should be balanced out and used as seeding in tournaments. It gives them more meaning.
Yep, kinda like in tennis, it would be sooo much better ...